Sugar Crash

A contemporary story of nuanced friendship between women.

Dar, an Israeli, and Antoinette, an American, met during their doctoral program at a prestigious Midwestern university in the United States and became close friends. As they graduate, their relationship, charged with a sharp erotic quality, faces a crossroads: Antoinette secures a position at a college, while Dar’s visa expires, compelling her, against her will, to return to Israel.

Instead, Dar embarks on a journey to Antoinette’s home in the American South, fueled by a faint yet unrealistic hope that the power of their friendship might somehow prevent her return to Israel. But on the Greyhound bus, her phone and wallet are stolen, along with her bag containing all her documents. Amid the economic crisis of 2008, Dar loses her last footholds on her identity, and in a mesmerizingly natural way, slips into a world of beggars and drifters, tents and freight trains.

Dar’s gradual metamorphosis allows spontaneous tapestries of solidarity to replace, if only momentarily, institutions that have failed and social contracts that have lost their meaning. Sugar Crash is a captivating, finely nuanced contemporary novel, vividly depicting a world that expels what is human—and the life that is still able to exist on its margins.