Leora Skolkin-Smith – författare

Set in the turbulent 1970s when Patty Hearst became Tanya the Revolutionary, HYSTERA is a timeless story of madness, yearning, and identity. After a fatal accident takes her father away, Lillian Weill blames herself for the family tragedy. Tripping through failed love affairs with men and doomed friendships, all Lilly wants is to be sheltered from reality. She retreats from the outside world into a world of delusion and the private terrors of a New York City Psychiatric Hospital.How do we know who we really are? How do we find our true selves under the heavy burden of family and our pasts? In an unpredictable portrait of mental illness, HYSTERA penetrates to the pulsing heart of the questions.WINNER: GLOBAL E-BOOK AWARDS, USA BOOK AWARDS IN FICTIONFINALIST: INTERNATIONAL BOOK AWARDS, INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARDS

It's summer, 1963. Fourteen-year-old Liana travels to Jerusalem, accompanied by her older sister and larger-than-life mother. The trip takes her from a sheltered life in Westchester County, NY to the hot, bustling, and thoroughly confusing landscape of the Middle East, where Jewish and Arab cultures exist side by side in an uneasy truce. She soon drifts away from her colorful family and their over-the-top relatives, and starts a furtive, increasingly passionate, secret relationship with the runaway son of an American diplomat. Together, they abscond to neighboring Palestine, where they hide in an abandoned monastery, while a frantic search for the two missing youngsters gets under way on the other side of an increasingly hostile border.Both a deeply sensual story and a vivid depiction of a world growing increasingly fractured, Edges is a masterfully written triumph of nuanced storytelling.FINALIST NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDSFINALIST INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARDSFINALIST INTERNATIONAL BOOK AWARDS