The Land Agent Read online

  The land that didn’t exist on any map does in fact exist although about a kilometre to the north-east of Naharayim. It forms part of the land cultivated by Kibbutz Ashdot Ya’akov (Ichud) where the author lived and worked for six years during the 1980s. The land was, in fact, known as The Jungle by the members of the kibbutz and the author worked in the cotton and alfalfa fields there. It is overlooked by a viewing site known as The End of the World because of its vistas as described in this book. Adjacent to this point is the rather beautiful kibbutz cemetery.

  The Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA) did exist but all of its deeds and personnel as mentioned in this book are purely fictitious. Mewat is a properly documented land right under the Ottoman Code relating to ‘dead land’ but was outlawed by the British via the Mewat Land Ordinance of 1921.

  Acknowledgements

  The author is extremely grateful to both Creative Scotland and The Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship for their support in the writing of this novel.

  The author would also like to thank Ross Bradshaw at Five Leaves Publications for nurturing his first two books, The Credit Draper and The Liberation of Celia Kahn, then releasing them to be published alongside The Land Agent as part of a unified trilogy – known as the Glasgow to Galilee trilogy – all under the Saraband imprint.

  About the Author

  J. David Simons was born in Glasgow in 1953. He studied law at Glasgow University and became a partner at an Edinburgh law firm before giving up his practice in 1978 to live on a kibbutz in Israel. Since then he has lived in Australia, Japan and England, working at various stages along the way as a charity administrator, cotton farmer, language teacher, university lecturer and journalist. He returned to live in Glasgow in 2006.

  Apart from his Glasgow to Galilee trilogy, he has also written about contemporary and 1950s Japan in his novel An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful (2013). His work has been shortlisted for The McKitterick Prize and he has been the recipient of two Writer’s Bursaries from Creative Scotland and a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship.

  Novels by J David Simons

  THE GLASGOW TO GALILEE TRILOGY:

  The Credit Draper

  The Liberation of Celia Kahn

  The Land Agent

  An Exquisite Sense of What Is Beautiful

  Copyright

  Published by Saraband,

  Suite 202, 98 Woodlands Road

  Glasgow, G3 6HB

  Scotland

  www.saraband.net

  Copyright © J. David Simons 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without first obtaining the written permission of the copyright owner.

  ISBN: 9781908643766

  ebook: 9781908643773

  Printed in the EU on sustainably sourced paper.

  Editor: Craig Hillsley

  Text design by Laura Jones

  The Glasgow to Galilee Trilogy

  While The Land Agent stands as a novel in its own right, it is also the third part of a loose trilogy incorporating two other novels, The Credit Draper and The Liberation of Celia Kahn, also published by Saraband. The three books can be read separately and in any order.

  An Exquisite Sense of What Is Beautiful

  An eminent British writer returns to the resort hotel in Japan where he once spent a beautiful, snowed-in winter. It was there he fell in love and wrote a best-selling novel accusing America of being in denial about the horrific destruction during World War II. As we learn more, however, we realise that he too is in denial, and that his past is now rapidly catching up with him. A sweeping novel of East and West, love and war, truth and delusion.