Driving too fast through Israel’s Negev desert in his SUV after a long day in the hospital, Dr Eitan Green accidentally hits a lone Eritrean man on the empty moonlit road, killing him instantly. Panic stricken he drives off instead of calling for help and confessing what he’s done. A decision that will change the course of his life irrevocably because the dead man’s wife, the elegant, enigmatic Sikrit, knows what happened. In atonement for his crime Sikrit insists the doctor start treating Eritrean refugees after his hospital dayshifts at clandestine makeshift hospitals in the desert. A nail-biting and morally devastating drama of guilt, racism, shame and desire which stares unflinchingly at the darkness inside us all, and asks the reader: what would you have done? (Picture: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Photo credit: Alon Siga.)
Welcome to the World Book Club podcast.
I'm Harriet Gilbert and this month we've been reading a page turning novel of guilt, deception, racism and desire.
It's called Waking Lions, and here to answer questions about it from BBC listeners around the world is its Israeli author, Ayelet Gundagoshin.
Ayelet, welcome to BBC World Book Club.
Hello.
Good to be here.
You're speaking to us from Nairobi in Kenya.
Is that because you're on holiday there or you're working there or what now.
I'm on a prep production tour for a TV drama.
Ah, okay.
Well, Ayelet Gundegosen has won awards both for her screen work and her novels, including the novel we're talking about today, Waking Lions.
Set in southern Israel in the dust of the Negev desert, it's the story of a hospital doctor, Eitan Green, who's driving home from work one night when he accidentally hits a man and kills him and drives away, leaving the body unreported by the road.
That is not the end of the matter.
The dead man, an Eritrean migrant, leaves a widow and she tracks Eitan to his house, where she makes him an offer he can't refuse in return for not reporting him to the police, or indeed to his wife.
She wants him to come every night to an abandoned garage she knows and look after injured and or ill Eritreans who can't go to hospital because they're in the country illegally.
So begins a nightmare for Eitan, who grows ever more exhausted as he does his regular job by day and this highly irregular one by night, and who is all the time terrified that his wife and sons will find out what he did.
A possibility all the greater because Eitan's wife is a detective.
But let's start with the accident itself.
This is in the English translation by Sondra Silverstone, and Eitan is driving his new red SUV through the nighttime desert.
The road in front of him was empty, inviting.