**

YOU might know Clemency Burton- Hill already from her colourful career as an actress and presenter.

Unfortunately, All The Things You Are, a romance novel that uses the Israeli-Arab conflict as a backdrop, is not quite enough to establish her as an equally successful author of fiction.Protagonist Natasha Bernstein is a Jewish New Yorker down on her luck – she loses her job and her fiancé in quick succession, and finds herself in Israel, accompanied by her new beau, a dreamy New Yorker of Palestinian extraction.

There are bittersweet moments that make a good impact and, crucially, give you the momentum to keep plodding on to the end. But the characters are almost entirely paper-thin in their motivation, dialogue and behaviour. They seem to move from one situation to the next, barely registering much in the way of cause and effect, while the lesser characters are little more than rudimentary sketches. The books climax, in spite of its grave subject matter, falls oddly flat.

Amy Nicholson