THE BOOK OF LOVE AND HATE

This novel follows the story of Jennifer Baron, a failed Olympic speed skater from a privileged, but dysfunctional family who is trying to come to terms with her traumatic past. While working for her father’s billion-dollar foundation, she ends up embroiled in her father’s illegal activities, falls in love/lust with her father’s Israeli lover—Gila Zyskun—and is eventually forced to choose whether her life should be governed by love, hate, or the often more damaging crime of indifference.

Jennifer Baron is a spectacularly failed speed skater trying to stay sober a couple of decades after her Olympic downfall. She is running
her father’s billion-dollar foundation—the clean side of his business— when her father mysteriously disappears, perhaps running from the
FBI, perhaps six feet under. Soon Jen is invited to a conference in Tel Aviv which turns into a clandestine meeting with her father and his lover Gila Zyskun, a former Israeli army pilot turned corporate spy.

Jen immediately falls for Gila, they make love, and Jen agrees to move “information” out of Israel for her father, though she knows this can’t be legal. A few months later, when the FBI claims her father’s been blown up in a Jerusalem hotel, Jen returns to Tel Aviv, beginning a needle-in-haystack search for her father, dead or alive, and for his/her lover.

Jen’s past and present come to a head as American and Israeli law-enforcement agents close in, pressuring her to turn on Gila and/or her father, and Jen is forced to choose whether her life should be governed by love, hate, or the often more traumatic crime of indifference.

LAUREN SANDERS is the author of two novels—Kamikaze Lust, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and With or Without You. Her writing has appeared in various publications and journals including Bookforum, the American Book Review, and Time Out New York. She is a resident of the great nation of Brooklyn.