Image - detail from cover of City of a Thousand Gates
Past Event

Reading Californians Book Discussion: City of a Thousand Gates

The silver medalist in the 2022 California Book Awards category of first fiction, Rebecca Sacks will join us via Zoom to discuss her book City of a Thousand Gates. 

She has written a relevant novel that introduces a large cast of characters from various backgrounds in a setting (Israel) where violence is routine and where survival is defined by boundaries, walls, and checkpoints that force people to live and love within and across them. The multiple strands of the various characters' lives open this magnificent and haunting novel of present-day Israel and Palestine, following each of the diverse characters as they try to protect what they love. Their interwoven stories reveal complicated, painful truths about life in this conflicted land steeped in hope, love, hatred, terror, and blood on both sides. The book brilliantly evokes the universal drives that motivate these individuals to think and act as they do—desires for security, for freedom, for dignity, for the future of one’s children, for land that each of us, no matter who or where we are, recognize and share. 

Notes

A Reading Californians Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

Main image: detail from cover of City of a Thousand Gates.

August 2, 2022

The Commonwealth Club of California
110 The Embarcadero
Max Thelen Board Room
San Francisco, CA 94105
United States

Speakers

Rebecca Sacks

Author, City of a Thousand Gates (participating via Zoom)

Kalena Gregory

Chair, Reading Californians Member-led Forum Book Discussion