A seventeen-year-old from Jerusalem, Tal Levine comes from a family that always believed peace would come to the Middle East. She cried tears of joy when President Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Yasser Arafat in 1993-a moment of hope that would stay with her forever. But when a terrorist explosion kills a young woman at a café in Jerusalem, something changes for Tal. One day she writes a letter, puts it in a bottle, and sends it to Gaza-to the other side-beginning a correspondence with a young Palestinian man that will ultimately open their eyes to each other's lives and hearts. When a Palestinian boy reads a letter from an Israeli girl, two lives are changed forever. Valerie Zenatti was born in Nice, France on April Fool's Day in 1970. When she was thirteen, her family moved to Israel. Her experiences with the Israeli Defense Forces were chronicled in her first book When I Was a Soldier. She currently lives with her two children in Paris, where she is a Hebrew translator.