The Levite's Concubine

By Ann Chamberlin

Fiction

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In 1974, a young Israeli student of archaeology takes charge of her first dig, only to find the lives she uncovers impinging on her own. In 1950, Hammama Madmoni, a new Yemeni Jewish immigrant to Israel, gives birth to a daughter in Jerusalem hospital; the child disappears and she is told it died. Twenty-four years later to the day, Orit Nussbaum - an archeologist raised by Auschwitz survivor too scarred to nurture - sits beside Hammama in that same hospital. Neglecting her dig at Gibeah to do her duty by this suffering mother, and haunted by visions of the ancient lives she is unearthing, Orit struggles with the patriarchy of her field, with colonisation, and with the myths made then and now, searching for her own place in the world. 

Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Ann Chamberlin majored in Archaeology of the Middle East at the University of Utah and spent a summer excavating the biblical city of Beersheva. She has studied Hebrew, Arabic, Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient Akkadian, as well as English, French and German. The author of some twenty published books - mostly historical novels, many set in the Middle East, including a trilogy set in sixteenth-century Turkey - she has also written plays, among them the award-winning JIHAD. She lives near Salt Lake City, except when she's at her bookshop in the Arizona Renaissance Festival. Or in Paris.