CrocAttack! Gavron's first novel to be translated into English

CrocAttack!, a novel by the Israeli writer Assaf Gavron, published on Thursday, should be particularly interesting for British readers. It tells the story of a young resident of Tel Aviv who narrowly misses being killed in terrorist attacks during the second Palestinian intifada, which began in 2000. Gavron, who is 41, was in London working on the novel when the 7/7 bombings took place, and when I met him in Tel Aviv last year he described how he watched as the bombings began to have the same psychological impact on Londoners that the almost daily attacks had had on Israelis a few years earlier: paranoia side by side with detachment. “We were the professional bomb victims,” he says.

The novel is structured around two converging first-person narratives: Eitan’s, the young Israeli who lives in hip, secular Tel Aviv, and that