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The Human Scale
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Peter Ganim
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By:
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Lawrence Wright
About this listen
Lawrence Wright at the height of his powers. Centers around the newfound—and forced—relationship between a Palestinian American FBI agent and a hard-line Israeli cop, working together uneasily to solve the murder of the Israeli police chief in Gaza. Moving, thrilling, with extraordinary scope, it does for Palestine and Israel what Gorky Park did years ago for Russia. In the vein of John le Carré and Graham Greene, this is the rare novel that manages to entertain, educate, and deeply move the listener.
Tony Malik is a half-Irish, half-Arab New York-based FBI agent, specializing in money flowing from drug and arms deals. The novel opens in shocking fashion, and Malik’s life changes radically. A long-term relationship ends, and his job is on the verge of being taken away from him. During this period he learns more about his roots and becomes interested in his father's past and family—his father came to America years ago from Palestine. Malik decides to make a trip to his father's homeland to attend the wedding of his niece, whom he has never met. As a result of his plans, he is given a simple assignment by his boss at the FBI, partly to see how well he can still do his job. That simple assignment becomes anything but simple.
As soon as he arrives in Gaza, the Israeli police chief overseeing the area is murdered. Malik is at first a suspect. Then, due to his superior investigative skills, he is invited into the Israeli investigation, seeking the murderer. At the core of this novel is Malik's relationship with Yossi, the hard-line anti-Arab Israeli police officer leading the investigation. They must learn to trust each other because, as they move closer to solving the case, they realize there is no one else they can trust on either side.
Extraordinary three-dimensional characters populate this novel: Yossi's daughter, studying in Paris, trying to escape the violence that surrounds her in Israel; Malik's niece, whose wedding and life are shattered by the murder; her fiancé, a peacenik whose existence is complicated by the fact that his cousin is high up in the Hamas command; religious leaders on both sides; corrupt Israeli cops; Palestinians thirsting for violence against Israel; Israelis determined to crush the Palestinians. Lawrence Wright brings a wide and complicated tapestry to life, one that culminates on October 7, 2023, with the deadly Hamas attack on Israel. But he has written more than just a thriller, or even just an examination of all these complicated lives. He has written a novel that manages to explore and explain much of the devastating history that encompasses the relationship between Israel and Palestine—and shows it to us in a way that poignantly reveals the tragic human scale that is involved.
©2025 Lawrence Wright (P)2025 Random House AudioCritic reviews
"In this lacerating novel, Wright draws on years of experience in Israel and Palestine to forge a layered tale of intrigue and betrayal. It is a novel of hard truths; a bitter indictment of the corrupt, cruel leaders on both sides who have caused immeasurable suffering."—Geraldine Brooks; Pulitzer Prize winning novelist
"Wright’s The Human Scale, set in Hebron, is a furnace of conflict between Israeli settlers and Palestinian terrorists but also between ordinary Israelis and ordinary Palestinians, an unsettlingly relentless suspenseful portrait of terror, intolerance and cruelty on both sides, on all sides, tempered by humanity, family and love, packed with knowledge and facts, a ticking bomb of a book that explodes in Hamas’s October 7 slaughter—this is the first October 7 novel."—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem
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