Yara Av Tamara Faith Berger

From the author of Maidenhead, a reverse cautionary tale about a young woman exploring the boundaries of sex and belonging in the early 2000s Distraught that her teenage daughter is in love with a woman a decade older, Yara’s mother sends Yara away from their home in Brazil on a Birthright trip to Israel for Jewish youth. Freed from her increasingly controlling and jealous girlfriend, Yara is determined to forge her own path and follow her desires.But Birthright takes a debaucherous turn, and Yara flees Israel for Toronto, where she is forced to reframe her relationship, exploring the possibility that it might have been abusive. From there she heads for California, where she plays with the line between erotic film and real life. As Yara wanders, she tries to keep her head above water, connecting the dots between the lands in which she finds herself, the places she has been, and the places she is headed."Tamara Faith Berger is one of our best writers of the body, capturing in sharp, red-hot prose its raw animal urges, its often confused and contradictory desires, and the way our search for pleasure can be both liberatory and self-annihilating. Like Israel, bodies are contested territories, and in Berger''s revelatory new novel, Yara seeks to wrest control and meaning from the forces that seek to instrumentalize hers: nationalism, capitalism, pornography, and lovers." – Jordan Tannahill, author of The Listeners