BASED ON A TRUE STORY - Hesh Kestin

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Set on the eve of WWII in an erotically charged Africa, an intensely un-Gauguinesque Polynesia and a Hollywood of explosive racial and gender identities, the three novellas that make up Based on a True Story reveal the roots of contemporary life in a world at war with itself. As exotically romantic as Joseph Conrad, comic as Philip Roth, magical as Steve Stern and Bernard Malamud and as intricately compelling as any thriller, Hesh Kestin’s tales reveal the shameless private lives of women and men caught in the violent crossfire between sensuality and power, love and fear, conscience and deliriously uncontrolled erotic abandon.


"A !@#!%&#! masterpiece—war, passion, greed, fear, nobility and love’s perversion in the face of unfathomable reality. I actually did cry at the end!”
—Ruthie Blum, the Jerusalem Post


"Magisterial. The language alone is sigh-inducing, like Scott Fitzgerald on crystal meth telling tales to Joseph Conrad, who would have wanted to steal the sensually exotic plots. Pure joy.”
—Craig Karpel, Pajamas Media

"Hesh Kestin's novellas offer pleasures all too rare in contemporary American fiction: the pleasures of wide-ranging cosmopolitanism and historical sophistication."
—Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars

"Hesh Kestin has a deep understanding of human culture and an uncanny ability to people his terrains with mesmerizing prophets. If a well-lived life is a person's best defense against a fear of death, then in this absorbing book Kestin arms his characters and his readers elegantly for the battle.”
—Marc Siegel, MD, author of False Alarm: the Truth About the Epidemic of Fear

Hesh Kestin is a recovering foreign correspondent who reported on local wars, global business and exotic mayhem in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for such publications as Forbes, Newsday and the Jerusalem Post, and wrote for US magazines as diverse as Playboy and Inc. Cited by Media Guide for best foreign correspondence, his work has garnered Clarion and National Headliner awards and constant threats of reprisal. “If they don’t wave a gun or call in the lawyers,” he says, “You’re not doing your job.” Before hanging up his trench-coat to return to his roots as a novelist he founded the Israeli daily The Nation and the prize-winning expatriate weekly The American, and wrote a non-fiction book, 21st-Century Management [Grove Atlantic], about a major software company whose leadership is currently in federal prison. Kestin now lives in the Hamptons, the New York exurb where the greatest danger is being run down by a Ferrari –and likes it that way. “In fiction if someone pulls an AK-47 on you,” he explains, “You just make sure it jams.” Set in World-War-II Africa, Polynesia and Hollywood, the three novellas that make up Based On A True Story–by turns comic and tragic, erotic and violent, global and intensely personal—reveal the roots of contemporary life in a world at war with itself.