Nomi Eve's "Henna House"

Nomi Eve is the author of Henna House and The Family Orchard, which was a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection and was nominated for a National Jewish Book Award.

She has an MFA in fiction writing from Brown University and has worked as a freelance book reviewer for The Village Voice and New York Newsday.

Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, The Voice Literary Supplement, Conjunctions, and The International Quarterly.

She lives in Philadelphia with her family.

Here Eve dreamcasts an adaptation of Henna House:

My book takes place far from Hollywood in an early twentieth century community of Jews in Northern Yemen. For authenticity, I would cast Yemenite Jewish actors in Israel in all the main roles. My characters would look like the singer Achinoam Nini, who is widely known as Noa. She is one of the most beautiful, talented people in the world. Unfortunately, she is too much a woman to play the girls in my book, but if she had a niece, a daughter….that’s who I would pick for Hani.

As for the director, I would choose Anthony Minghella, who unfortunately passed away in 2008. His film, The English Patient, based upon Michael Ondaatje’s novel breaks my heart every time I see it. And if Minghella could make the Saharan desert work as the backdrop for that film, the hillside villages of North Yemen would be a piece of cake. The sun-burnished vistas of that film are the self same colors of my characters’ lives.

Visit Nomi Eve's website and Facebook page.

--Marshal Zeringue