The Man of Twists and Turns

The Collaborator of Bethlehem, the first Omar Yussef Mystery, is published this week in the U.S. and The Washington Post today gives it a terrific review: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/28/AR2007012801300.html?referrer=emailarticle It includes the following:“Rees tells this grim story with skill, specificity and richly detailed descriptions of people and places. …The Collaborator of Bethlehem is readable and literate, and [...]

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Jerusalem correspondent Matthew Kalman profiles me in today’s edition of the paper. It’s a long article with lots of praise for the Omar Yussef Mysteries. It also compares me to one of my heroes, the great San Francisco crime writer Dashiell Hammett:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/04/DDGF6NBRN71.DTL

After producing a video on youtube about Omar Yussef featuring locations from the first of my mystery novels, I’ve added Italian and French versions of the clip. You can find them at the following links: in italiano:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKGXLe9f0eE en francais:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbgN7bErw_4 The first Omar Yussef novel will be published by Cairo Editore in Italy in April under [...]

Look at the Dark Side of Christmas in Bethlehem, then send it to your friends: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV26hWuYqxI This is a video I made in Bethlehem and Dehaisha camp, in which I introduce Omar and the story of “The Collaborator of Bethlehem”. It shows some of the locations featured in the first Omar Yussef novel.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced last weekend that he would call new presidential and parliamentary elections, because Hamas leaders in parliament refused to join a coalition government that might persuade international donors to lift their boycott of the Palestinian Authority. Hamas, which defeated Abbas’s Fatah Party in this year’s parliamentary election, rejected the move and [...]

Publishers Weekly and Booklist, two important arenas for pre-publication reviews, give my forthcoming “The Collaborator of Bethlehem” starred reviews. Here are some excerpts: “This powerful first novel from British journalist Rees humanizes the struggle of the West Bank, where Omar Yussef, a modest 56-year old schoolteacher in the Dehaisha Palestinian refugee camp, becomes an unlikely [...]

My forthcoming mystery “The Collaborator of Bethlehem” has been reviewed in Kirkus Reviews and the reviewer highlights the portrayal of the violent environment Omar Yussef must face down. “Omar Yussef… takes to the mean streets–and are they ever mean,” Kirkus writes. It’s something I aimed for in writing the book: an accurate portrayal of what [...]

The first pre-publication review for The Collaborator of Bethlehem, the Omar Yussef Mystery to be published in the US on February 1 by Soho Press, is out. And Library Journal loves it! The influential magazine gave my book a “Starred Review.” Here it is, reprinted with permission: “In this outstanding debut, Rees, formerly the Jerusalem [...]

Journalism is fiction. Don’t believe me? Open a newsmagazine and you’ll be expected to believe that a given Hollywood star is actually a nice man, that you can drive everywhere and not get fat provided you lay off fruit, and that the latest development in the Middle East gives hope that things there will get [...]

Writers have it all wrong. They think they need to learn about other writers. I studied English literature at Oxford University and I read all I could find of the sort of literary criticism which makes a novel seem like a piece of East German economic analysis. Three years later, I hadn’t learned a thing, [...]