PUMPKINFLOWERS is the true story of a small group of soldiers, including the author, who are sent to secure an isolated hilltop in hostile territory and are changed forever by the experience. Matti Friedman's second work of non-fiction is about coming of age in a world of complexity and contradiction. It recounts dramatic but forgotten events during the 1990s at the Pumpkin, a small military outpost in Lebanon. The book traces the lives of a cadre of young men, against the backdrop of a bewildering and changing Middle East. In the spirit of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, PUMPKINFLOWERS is a brilliant writer's effort to make sense of a peculiar and fraught military conflict and to assess its historical importance - not only as a force that shaped a generation of Israelis but also as a paradigm for the other contemporary Middle East wars. Told with power and grace, and with a sensitivity not just to tragedy but also to the bizarre and even comic sides of armed conflict, PUMPKINFLOWERS represents a new generation of non-fiction writing from Israel, and a new voice from a country so often talked about but so rarely understood.