...(The Hiding Room is) set in wartime Palestine which first came out in 1995 and has now been republished. It is half-love story, half-historical thriller.

Another of Wilson’s men in mid-life crisis has come to Israel to bury his mother. He becomes increasingly preoccupied with his unknown father. Who was he? And why did his mother speak so little about him?

This is intercut with the story of an English officer, Archie Rawlins, and a young Jewish refugee whom he meets —- and falls for — in wartime Cairo.

It doesn’t work too well as a thriller and is much more interesting as an exploration of identity. None of the main characters really belong; they are all different kinds of outsider. They are all foreigners: Jewish refugees or British officers in the Middle East.

More interestingly, they are not at ease with themselves. Mendoza, a rabbi with the British army, a fascinating creation, doesn’t fit in with his antisemitic colleagues. Rawlins isn’t from the right class and his conventional, English upbringing is too constricting, too inauthentic. His romance with Esta, the Jewish refugee from Vienna, brings him in touch with new, more passionate, even violent feelings. His world starts to crumble around him. Can he find a new kind of self and what should it be?...

David Herman

In this vividly and confidently written book, Jonathan Wilson's spare and precise prose continues in the vein of his first collection Schoom (1993), in which he showed an enviable ability to write about British Jewishness. Here, he takes on not only the "Jewish survivor" but, particularly, British attitudes to the Arabs and Jews in the Middle East during the Second World War. There is also a parallel and, in the end, skilfully dovetailed story set in the Israel of fifty years later.

Peter Sherwood