The Last Rain — Edeet Ravel

To six-year-old Dori, everything seems possible. And to her family and their peers--secular, left-leaning North American Jews--the young state of Israel offers the same promise as the starry-eyed kibbutz movement prepares the ground for the settlers' ideals of justice and cooperation to take root and flourish. They settle on Eldar in northern Galilee, determined to create a new utopia, but life on this remote hill, three kilometres from the Lebanese border, is far more complex than any of its inhabitants could have imagined. The Last Rain tells the story of Eldar's emergence as a kibbutz through Dori's eyes, as well as through documentary fragments that take the reader on a labyrinthine journey through the characters' collective past. With humour, sensitivity, and a deep love for the land, Ravel portrays the coming of age of a young girl and of a country in the first precarious years of its existence.