What’s next in store for you? Any ideas for a new book? Also, The Almond Tree has received some amazing reviews, so much so that it has been spoken on par with Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Does that feel like it’s too much pressure, especially since readers will now have high expectations from whatever you write next?

I’m just finishing my next book. When I wrote The Almond Tree I wanted people to see the situation through Nora’s POV, but I was unable to give her all my flaws. To be a complex character, one must have flaws. She was who I wished I could have been and failed to be. In retrospect, I think I was hiding all her flaws from Ahmed.  
 
Someone asked me to expand on the Nora/Ahmed romance. I began to write it from Nora’s POV and the story just flowed.
 
The Almond Tree is written in a style similar to Khaled Hosseini’s. He was able to open the east up to westerners. I needed a different writing style to capture Nora’s POV. In The Almond Tree, Ahmed’s relationship with Nora is a small part of his book, for Nora it is her entire book. In my next book, I am conveying what it was like for me to come back to the US after living in Israel for seven years. I thought I would re-acclimate easily, but that didn’t turn out to be the case.  Going from Ahmed’s world to Harvard was a huge culture shock. Although it’s a great university, I found the issues that people were dealing with in the US so superficial compared to what I had experienced in Israel. I needed more of an Emily Giffin style to capture that reality. My next book is more of a social commentary on American society.