A powerful and authoritative account of how the Biden administration fueled atrocities in Gaza, from an award-winning foreign affairs journalist. Following Hamas’s horrific October 7 attack, Israel launched an offensive of staggering violence in Gaza, saying it targeted militants while regularly striking hospitals, schools, and homes. Critically acclaimed journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed offers extensive reporting and chilling new details about how the Biden administration enabled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu―ignoring warnings from government experts and implicating Americans in thousands of apparent war crimes. Washington did little to free Israeli hostages or shield innocent Palestinians as protests grew nationwide and international human rights principles crumbled. Still, President Joe Biden denied he was giving Netanyahu a blank check. He set a “red line” over the town of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians were sheltering, saying an assault there would risk Israel’s pipeline of American bombs. Yet after Netanyahu’s advance began, deepening Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe, Biden’s team kept weapons flowing. In vivid prose and with unparalleled access to insiders, Ahmed depicts a White House that resisted a course correction as its failures became undeniable. He probes Biden’s inner circle: a paranoid and imperious group shaped by the War on Terror, whose choices fueled tens of thousands of avoidable deaths among Palestinians, Lebanese, and Israelis, torpedoed long-time standards for warfare, and created a more dangerous world for us all. The Biden administration’s decisions drove voter backlash that helped Donald Trump regain power, and established patterns of impunity that have spurred wider bloodshed under Trump. Crossing the Red Line is an urgent reckoning with Biden’s record on Gaza that is vital to understanding historic damage to America’s standing in the world, and a period whose dark consequences will resonate globally for decades to come.

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME, NPR, OPRAH DAILY, KIRKUS REVIEWS, DEBUTIFUL AND MORE! “In equal measure compelling and heart wrenching. ” —Claire Messud “Overwhelming and exquisite–in a word, sublime.” —Namwali Serpell “A novel of remarkable delicacy and power.”—Katie Kitamura An intense, atmospheric novel about the devastating power of friendship, set against the backdrop of two cataclysmic events After Marissa loses her mother at six, the most intimate relationship of her life begins. Her marine biologist father, determined to channel his grief into completing his wife’s research, whisks her across the globe to Thailand. There she meets Arielle, and a fairytale friendship takes hold. During the week, the girls live at the resort owned by Arielle’s parents; on the weekends they join the tight-knit community of researchers on a nearby island. Together the girls discover the fragile wonders of its reefs, forests, and beaches. Together they learn to dive into the deep, holding their breath for minutes at a time, as effortlessly synchronized as the manta rays they come to know by name. Together they learn to swim their way out of danger. But then comes a wave Arielle can’t outpace, leaving Marissa gutted with loss. Years later, Marissa is back in New York, adrift and haunted by the memory of her friend. Over the course of two fateful days, as another cataclysm approaches the city and the past comes flooding back, she discovers how to sustain herself in a precarious world.