‘In This Is How We Talk by Julian Furman, two Israeli thirty-somethings – Yonatan and Lia – are desperately trying to salvage some love from their deteriorating relationship as well as meaning for their existence in a country at war with its neighbours and at war with itself. As important as the two main protagonists is Tel-Aviv, a city that is forever expanding outwards and upwards, a melting pot of the rich and dispossessed, the immigrant and the sabra, the religious and the secular, the ancient and the modern, the Jew and the Arab. The author is equally at home steering the reader along the tree-lined central boulevards into the sleek nightclubs and up into the sea-view towers of the wealthy, as he is among the darker areas of the city frequented by the drug addicts and the homeless or beyond to the outlying suburbs where the Arab population live. This is a stylish, assured and compelling debut.’ J David Simons, author of The Credit Draper, An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful and A Woman of Integrity