THE TALES OF BISMUTH by Jamie Kirkpatrick (Tunisia)

The Tales of Bismuth: Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948
By Jamie Kirkpatrick (Tunisia 1970-72)
Independently Published
March 2024
250 pages
$4.99 (Kindle); $21.00 (Paperback); $33.98 (Hardcover)

• • • 

Jamie Kirkpatrick (Tunisia 1970-72)

The Tales of Bismuth is the sequel to Jamie Kirkpatrick’s debut novel, This Salted Soil: The Battle for Tunisia, 1942-1943. In that novel, Kirkpatrick (Tunisia, 1970-72) introduced his readers to Declan Shaw, a young Irish journalist who is based in Tunisia and assigned to cover the Allied North African campaign against Nazi Germany.

Upon completion of that journalistic assignment, Shaw goes to Palestine to cover events unfolding there. He arrives in the waning days of the British Mandate and begins to understand the complexities of of life in Palestine, the complexities of relations between Palestinians and Jews, as well as the complexities of the heart.

Shaw strives to report on events as a neutral observer, an almost impossible perspective to maintain given the entangled story of two peoples who claim one land. The novel ends with the onset of what Israelis call the War of Independence and what Palestinians refer to as their nakba, their “Catastrophe.”

• • • 

Kirkpatrick began work on this manuscript a little more than a year ago. He finished it just days before the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians and Israel’s subsequent bloody response. The Tales of Bismuth is both timely and readable history.