As anyone knows who has followed Lynne Reid Banks further than The L-Shaped Room, her passionate involvement with Israel became and remains a constant literary theme—indeed, Defy the Wilderness is a fictional by-product of historical research into the first Arab-Israeli war. If it sounds disparaging to call a powerful and professional novel a "by-product", the author can be blamed, for telling us about its conception, and still more for clarifying in the first few pages precisely how we are to regard her heroine Ann—as a non-Jewish writer from England (with lots of thick long hair and a loose Indian dress, as in the jacket photograph), revisiting Jerusalem after fourteen years to research a book "showing all sides" of that early war….

When Miss Reid Banks lets go on the rhetoric of Israel and its history, she is both eloquent and informative (though some might say propagandist...