
Sugar Crash
A contemporary story of nuanced friendship between women.
Sugar Crash is a novel about a journey across America, about friendship and its dissolution, about escape, and about the desire for a home in a world that is becoming increasingly alien and fragmented. After her student visa expired, upon completing her PhD in philosophy in a prestigious American University, Dar Hiba was supposed to return to Israel. Instead, she embarks on a journey from north to south of the US in a desperate attempt to reunite with her beloved schoolmate Toni, in the hopes of restoring a lost sense of camaraderie and intimacy. Following the theft of her backpack, she is left with nothing and finds herself tumbling down roads in the company of characters from the fringes of American society. Amid the economic crisis of 2008, Dar loses her last footholds on her identity, and in a slips into a world of beggars and drifters, tents and freight trains.
Dar’s voyage concludes in the Christian college town where Toni now teaches. There, an encounter with law and immigration authorities permanently tears apart their friendship. Yet the novel continues to follow their separate lives, now on different continents, which seems to continue to mirror each other, as well as other women’s lives in the novel – all struggling to assemble some sense of belonging and grappling with the demands of adulthood and the inevitability of aging.
In a history defined by crisis, spanning from the 2008 financial crash to the 2020 pandemic, Dar’s and Toni’s gradual metamorphosis allows spontaneous moments of solidarity to replace, if only temporarily, institutions that have failed and social contracts that have lost their meaning. Sugar Crash is a captivating, finely nuanced contemporary novel, that vividly depicts a world that expels what is human, and the lives still able to exist on its margins.

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““Orian Zakai's first novel is a beautiful late coming-of-age story, confronting the fragile boundaries between the normal and the abnormal. It makes for a gripping and intense read.””