The sealed room in which an Israeli family sleeps during the Iraqi SCUD attacks is the point of departure for an extraordinary journey through war and memory to new hope. Rachel Kadish's novel introduces three women trapped by different circumstances yet united in their desire for liberation.

In a landscape locked in violence, Tami Shachar, an Israeli woman, is bewildered by her growing estrangement from those most dear to her: she fails to communicate with her husband, she cannot will herself into closeness with her mother, she teeters on the edge of crisis with her son. And her own silence threatens to erase her.

Maya, Tami's American cousin, takes a semester off from college in the United States and travels to Jerusalem, in the thrall of her mother's long-ago wish to move to Israel. Their relationship has always been strained: perhaps now Maya can prove her devotion.

It is Maya's elderly downstairs neighbor, Shifra, who provides the spark that will set the lives of the three women in motion. A survivor of the Holocaust who has wandered for years in her dreams and memories, Shifra is awakened by the arrival of the American. Through a haze of loss and delusion, she determines that Maya is none other than the Redeemer, come to set things right at last.

As the country struggles to break out of its own deadlock and moves toward the possibility of peace, these three women must ask themselves what it means to be American or Israeli - or simply human, in times that seem to mandate inhumanity. They strive to define a different future, a different way to love. Ultimately, each must enact her own liberation, must risk unsealing a window or a door to step outside into uncertain daylight.