Sunburnt Faces is one of those books that stays with you long after you’ve read it. In this interview, Shimon Adaf talks about inspiration, process and language among other things.

Would you like to speak first about the inspiration behind Sunburnt Faces and the process you went through in writing it? 

It took me a while to get to writing fiction. I was thirty when I wrote my first novel. Before this I wrote and published poetry. In my first novels I was constantly looking for structural devices to maintain the interest of the novel.  My first novel took the detective form; I say the “detective form’, because I was interested more in the way the existence of a murder mystery drives the protagonist towards a certain metaphysical knowledge than finding the culprit. After finishing it, I had this image of a young girl in my head, wandering around…

Reviewed by Rowena C. Ruiz

And God Said to her, “Rise, Ori, my light, for your light has come.” 

And He let her fall from her life, although she hadn’t realized that she was at such a great height. 

And she fell.

Sunburnt Faces opens with a dramatic incident that takes place in the life of the main character, Ori, when she is at the cusp of adulthood.  God speaks to her from the TV set. This incident proves to be a defining moment for the events that follow later in life, and this experience becomes a thread which winds throughout the novel.

As we follow the events that take place during Ori’s childhood, we are also compelled to think of the incidents that have had a profound influence upon us. How do we deal with traumatic incidents? How do cope in a world that is filled with upheaval? Ori finds…