Sayed Kashua was born in 1975 in a village called Tira, in the Galilee, and went on to study at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He writes a weekly column for Ha’aretz, Israel’s most prestigious newspaper. Kashua briefly moved back to his childhood village after growing disillusioned with life in Jerusalem, and it was at that time that the idea for this novel took shape. But after growing disenchanted with life there, he moved with his wife and two small children to Beit Safafa, another Arab village within Israel. Less