A witty epistolary novel, both heartwarming and heart-wrenching, about a dysfunctional family-led by a Jewish pig farmer in Israel-struggling to love and accept each other.

As comic as it is deeply moving, Holy Lands chronicles a set of highly charged relationships within an estranged familyof colorful eccentrics. The patriarch, Harry Rosenmerck, is an aging Jewish cardiologist who has left his thriving medical practice in Paris to raise antiterrorist pigs in Israel.

Harry doesn’t use a computer or a telephone in his new life in Nazareth, so when members of his family want to be in touch, they must put pen to paper the old-fashioned way. The letters written by David, his gay son, an earnest and successful playwright in New York, have long gone unanswered by his disapproving father. Annabelle, Harry’s daughter, writes of the heartbreak she suffered at the hands of a married professor. David and Annabelle’s mother, Monique—Harry’s ex-wife—ruminates about their once happy marriage even as she quietly strives to survive an aggressive lethal cancer.

Holy Lands captures the distress and poignancy of an adult family striving to remain connected across time, geography, and radically different perspectives on life.