Crescent — Laurie Devine

Crescent, set in Lebanon, traces the lives and loves of four young women from their university days to their still passionate middle-age,
There is Leila, the ardent Palestinian, who falls in love with a young revolutionary but gives him up for marriage to an eminent politician: for much of her life power is even more attractive to Leila than sex. Next is Camilla, daughter of the former belly-dancer, Nirvana, who marries into one of the Maronite warlord clans and diverts herself, at first with International shopping sprees and then with Danish ski instructors, when she finds that her husband is endlessly unfaithful. Then there is Fatima, the Shia Muslim from a southern village who, against all expectations, finds fulfilment in an arranged marriage. And half-Jewish American who becomes a doctor and whose unhappy love life is sublimated in her work.
The friendship of these women who should be at war with each other if they followed the dictates of their political leaders, survives all the odds as the carefree days of their early womanhood - played against the natural splendours of the Lebanon, with its snow-capped mountains and golden beaches, are eclipsed by the long and bloody wars in which their own children are among the victims.