After falling in love with a French novice monk in an isolated Syrian monastery, American writer Stephanie Saldaña moved with her new husband into a house that straddled the line between East and West Jerusalem. Struggling to settle into her fragile new marriage and her equally precarious life on Nablus Road, Saldaña soon became pregnant with her first child. Her second memoir, A Country Between, chronicles the luminous, fraught, deeply formative years of living on a divided road within a city and country ravaged by many wars.
Saldaña (The Bread of Angels) observes the passage of seasons both outside her windows and inside her marriage: her husband, Frédéric, is a constant mystery, and Saldaña writes about their relationship as "a walk to meet each other, day after day, a promise, a shy approaching." Similarly, she learns the rhythms and greetings of her neighbors, the bread vendor on their doorstep, the nuns next door, and the mosaic of languages and cultures in this unfamiliar neighborhood that feels like home. As she grapples with pregnancy, writing, the reality of armed conflict and the challenges of daily life in Jerusalem, Saldaña grows ever more determined to study "the art of standing in front of the terrible, and waiting, hoping, that, in time, the beautiful would appear."
Thoughtful, candid and achingly lovely, A Country Between celebrates the moments of beauty and truth that appear even--or especially--in broken and hard places, bringing light and healing in unexpected ways. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams