Shani Boianjiu's stunning debut gives us a world where girls in the Israeli Defense Forces wait, endlessly--for womanhood, orders, war, peace. Yael trains marksmen and flirts with boys. Avishag stands guard, watching refugees throw themselves at barbed-wire fences. Lea, posted at a checkpoint, imagines stories behind the familiar faces that pass by her day after day. They gossip about boys and whisper of an ever more violent world just beyond view. They drill, constantly, for a moment that may never come. They live inside that single, intense second just before danger erupts. And they find that their dreams have stranger repercussions than they have been trained to imagine.

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“At a time when so many of America’s best writers seem to be in retreat from realism . . . Boianjiu’s bracing honesty is tonic. . . . The People of Forever Are Not Afraid is a fierce and beautiful portrait of the damage done by war.”
—The Washington Post

“We tend to associate world-weariness with age and experience, but as Shani Boianjiu’s stunning debut demonstrates, some experiences age us independent of the actual passage of time.”
—LA Review of Books

“Boianjiu’s prose is coarse, raw and altogether befitting her subject.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Powerful, touching stuff. . . . Boianjiu is an exciting, youthful writer, not afraid to take on heavy themes, and there’s no doubt we’ll be hearing from her again.”
—The Canadian Jewish News

“[Boianjiu’s] voice is distinct. It’s confident, raw, amusing—a lot like her women.”
—The New York Times

“The People of Forever Are Not Afraid is intelligent, disconcerting and powerful. . . . Boianjiu tells it like it is, and in the telling conveys the emotional toll taken on young lives when they are raised in a nascent country where politics, cultures, faiths and histories clash, and borders are always just a stone's throw away.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“A prose style that is, by turns, sharply comic, lyrically beautiful and chillingly flat. . . . The People of Forever is a modern anthem for doomed youth, a brilliant anatomisation of the yearning for normality in a situation that renders it impossible.”
—Financial Times

“Shani Boianjiu’s is an extravagant talent, which, while unevenly displayed, makes for a memorably bold novel. . . . Somewhere between the sardonic humour of Etgar Keret and the epic storytelling of David Grossman, Boianjiu has created a brave, beautiful political literature that is entirely her own.”
—The Telegraph (UK)

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SHANI BOIANJIU was born in Jerusalem in 1987, from an Iraqi and Romanian background. She was raised in a small town on the Lebanese border. At the age of 18, she entered the Israeli Defense Forces and served for two years. The People of Forever Are Not Afraid is her first book. The author lives in Israel.

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