When Daniel Jacobs decides to spend his junior year abroad in Israel, he never dreams he'll fall in love with both Jerusalem's Old City and an Israeli woman, Shoshana. It's the year religion becomes a part of his identity, from the heights of a simple rooftop. A year he encounters the tragic complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. A year that begins a four-decade-long love affair, as complicated and heartbreaking as the political conflict with which it's intertwined. As Daniel moves through life-through marriage and divorce, career and travel-he returns periodically to Jerusalem, where his heart faithfully remains.

A Rooftop in Jerusalem brings the Old City's walls, holy sites, and inhabitants to life, while putting a human face on headlines from the Middle East.

Praise for A Rooftop in Jerusalem

In his beautiful book, A Rooftop in Jerusalem, theologian-turned-novelist Michael Kinnamon entwines a deeply moving love story with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kinnamon's spirituality infuses his prose, and he comes as close as any outsider possibly can to understanding the inner reality of Israelis and Palestinians. A meditation on the persistence of love and the power of an open heart to transcend seemingly inviolate borders.
 
––Yossi Klein Halevi, author of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

A Rooftop in Jerusalem chronicles the turbulent spiritual growth of its main characters. By locating these inner journeys in Jerusalem, Michael Kinnamon offers a narrative of extraordinary spiritual depth. Among the novel’s many charms – its humor, its deft characterizations, its skilled craftsmanship – the reader will most appreciate the central romance: a love story between two star-crossed lovers, but also between the characters and the sacred city, and the author and the twisty, ancient neighborhood with its fateful rooftop. Michael Kinnamon – a novelist, theologian, and scholar with a poetic soul – has produced a lyrical, evocative work of great transcendence and heartbreak.

––Philip Graubart, author of Here There is No Why and Women and God

As someone who spent many years living in Jerusalem, I was grateful for the way A Rooftop in Jerusalem reawakened memories of that enigmatic, maddening, tragic, wonderful city. I was even more grateful for the way Michael Kinnamon captures the sense of transformative wonder that sometimes can occur in Jerusalem, as well as the heavy sadness of the history of murder that one can feel emanating from its ancient stones. A Rooftop in Jerusalem is particularly relevant in these days when so many are embracing simplistic pronouncements about the seemingly eternal conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The novel powerfully shows us the complexity of the situation: the grinding oppression that the occupation imposes on Palestinians, the way Israelis “live with the nagging fear of losing everything, the way Jews have often lost everything." It is a book that insists upon, and engages us with, the humanity of people in a place too often reduced to symbols and slogans.

––Wayne Karlin, author of The Genizah and Memorial Days

Michael Kinnamon's novel, A Rooftop in Jerusalem, is an ode to the ancient, divided city of Jerusalem, a lamentation for the sadness and suffering to which it has borne witness, and a love story that breaks our hearts and restores our hope at the same time.  

––Steve Seche, author of The Silversmith’s Secret

Rich with historical depth and political nuance, A Rooftop in Jerusalem movingly tells the story of an interfaith love affair while doubling as a tenderly written guide to Old City Jerusalem.

––Robert Kehlmann, author of The Rabbi’s Suitcase

A Rooftop in Jerusalem is an insightful story for these current times. It weaves together Daniel’s love for Jerusalem and for a woman he meets in Israel. These loves intertwine as Jerusalem evolves through the decades and Daniel’s story collects the voices and questions of people from so many backgrounds. I highly recommend this novel.

––Beth Dotson Brown, author of Rooted in Sunrise

There is nothing more evasive than memory, that fleeting period of time that memorializes itself in our minds but promises to never again emerge quite perfectly, a rejection of the way things once were. A Rooftop in Jerusalem is a love story that never quite takes off but still somehow soars—with a city and a person—evoking the true meaning of a first love that never escapes our whole being. Kinnamon reminds readers to view all perspectives, seek answers, and love with our whole hearts even from many miles away. A Rooftop in Jerusalem will show you the views, following the growth of a man who constantly returns to himself to find new viewpoints from his favorite rooftop. “There are always things beneath what you see,” Kinnamon writes, and he couldn’t be more right. A masterpiece of fiction and a memorial to youth, love, and theology. 


—Miranda Faye Dillon, award-winning author of The Unshatterables