Excerpt from City of Secrets by Stewart O'Nan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Not you," she said. "You're like me."

How? he wanted to ask, but was afraid of the answer.

When she cried after lovemaking or while they ate breakfast at her small table, he knew it was for her husband, whose name she wouldn't say. Brand had no money, and they'd come to a loose arrangement he soon regretted. He was forbidden to mention the word love, would be banished at the first hint of romance. She was not his, merely a comrade. She taught him Hebrew and English a phrase at a time, correcting his fledgling attempts with her perfect articulation, as if training him for the stage. In return, he chauffeured her to her assignations, waiting discreetly across the street, smoking and reading the paper, trying not to think of Katya, whose memory had sustained him in the camps and through the long, starry watches at sea. After Katya, whatever happened to him was nothing. The world was not the world.

Tonight the Zion Gate was jammed, traffic backed up along the wall, the rain falling in long needles through a red fog of exhaust. The line was stopped. In the stark wash of floodlights shining down from the sandbagged ramparts, soldiers were going from car to car with dogs, opening doors, pulling people out. The police hadn't called curfew in weeks. There must have been an action, though the radio said nothing. He tried the underground station at the far end of the dial and got a blast of static.

Ahead, a soldier with a tommy gun was frisking a gray-bearded Arab in full robes and headdress while a dog nosed about inside the car, a grave insult if the man were Moslem, dogs being unclean. It was quite possible the man was a Christian; many of them were. Brand, being a transplant, couldn't tell them apart. He was more concerned that the dog would muddy his seats, and wished he hadn't thrown away his paper. It was too late to turn around, and he shut off his engine to save gas.

His papers were false, as was the Peugeot's registration, the car itself stolen from Tel Aviv, repainted and fitted with a smuggler's false-bottomed trunk. If taken in for questioning, Brand had no defense. He'd be detained as an illegal and a thief, interrogated, then jailed or deported, but all the times he'd been stopped, all the checkpoints he'd braved, the police had never challenged him. While his documents—like current life, he might say—were passable forgeries, his license, a metal badge attached to the front bumper, and much harder to come by, was real. And yet, having been arrested before—once, in Riga, sitting in his booth in his favorite coffee shop—he knew that as a Jew you were never safe.

Excerpted from City of Secrets by Stewart O'Nan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.