A Lake Beyond The Wind ($12.95 paperback original; Jun. 1; 160 pp.; 1-56656-301-1): This absorbingly detailed realistic novel its veteran Palestinian author's first to reach English translationoffers in impressively compact form a panorama of the diaspora his country experienced during the watershed year of 1948, when Zionist military forces defeated a (hastily assembled) Arab Liberation Army. Yakhlif focuses on the village of Samakh, deftly juxtaposing accounts of rudimentary military ``training and reconnaissance'' (especially as recounted in the journal kept by an Iraqi mercenary soldier) with vignettes of village life dominated by ingenious symbolic foreshadowing (a cow bitten by a rabid dog; ``two rams butting one another with their heads''). A fine, bitter, bracing work, distinguished by precise construction and resonant understatement. – Copyright (c)1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
