The Mandelbaum Gate is a novel written by Scottish

Scottish people

The Scottish people , or Scots, are a nation and ethnic group native to Scotland. Historically they emerged from an amalgamation of the Picts and Gaels, incorporating neighbouring Britons to the south as well as invading Germanic peoples such as the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse.In modern use,...

 author Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark

Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was an award-winning Scottish novelist. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".-Early life:...

 published in 1965 and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize

James Tait Black Memorial Prize

Founded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...

 that year. The title refers to the Mandelbaum Gate

Mandelbaum Gate

Mandelbaum Gate is a former checkpoint between Israeli and Jordanian sectors of Jerusalem, just north of the western edge of the Old City along the Green Line...

 in Jerusalem around which the novel is set. It was included in Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess

John Burgess Wilson  – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...

's 1984 book Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 — A Personal Choice

Ninety-nine Novels

Anthony Burgess's book Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 — A Personal Choice covers a 44-year span between 1939 and 1983. Burgess was a prolific reader, in his early career reviewing more than 350 novels in just over two years for the Yorkshire Post...

.

Plot introduction

The book is set in Jerusalem in 1961 (with the backdrop of the Adolf Eichmann trial). Whilst on a pilgrimage to Holy Land

Holy Land

The Holy Land is a term which in Judaism refers to the Kingdom of Israel as defined in the Tanakh. For Jews, the Land's identifiction of being Holy is defined in Judaism by its differentiation from other lands by virtue of the practice of Judaism often possible only in the Land of Israel...

, half Jewish Catholic-convert Barbara Vaughn is planning to meet her fiance Harry Clegg, an archeologist working in Qumran

Qumran

Qumran is an archaeological site in the West Bank. It is located on a dry plateau about a mile inland from the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, near the Israeli settlement and kibbutz of Kalia...

 (where the Dead Sea Scrolls

Dead Sea scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name...

 were found). To do this she must pass through the Mandelbaum Gate into Jordan

Jordan

Jordan , officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan , Al-Mamlaka al-Urduniyya al-Hashemiyya) is a kingdom on the East Bank of the River Jordan. The country borders Saudi Arabia to the east and south-east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north and the West Bank and Israel to the west, sharing...

ian held Jerusalem; due to her Jewish roots this is a dangerous operation and she enlists the help of Freddy Hamilton, a staid British diplomat and various Arab contacts who may or may not be sympathetic to her cause...