He found a tourist company that arranged for him to stay with three different Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and the novel's setting became 'almost entirely literal'. Then he realised he needed to see how the Jewish settlers were living. When he came home, he rewrote, with 'the setting a bit closer to the West Bank', the geography more aligned, the city named Amarias, an anagram of Samaria. Seeing a military occupation up close, seeing a small number of people with guns telling a large number without guns what to do… it was so much more brutal than I thought it could be.' He'd been to Israel before, but after experiencing PalFest, 'everything I thought I knew about Israel was shattered. Then he heard about PalFest, Palestine's annual travelling festival of literature, and decided he needed to travel to the region. But at first, he wasn't sure if he wanted to make his wall so easily identifiable. It's an idea that had been rumbling in Sutcliffe's head for years, 'that the story of our era is the divide between the haves and the have-nots, and it seemed the wall in the West Bank was very specific to that situation, but also symbolic of other things happening elsewhere'.

Without making it explicit, it soon becomes clear that this is the West Bank, that Joshua, 13, is Jewish, and that Leila, the girl who saves his life on the other side of the wall, is Palestinian. On the other live the desperate, the occupied, and when Joshua, hunting for his lost football, discovers a tunnel that leads under the wall, he sets in action a series of dreadful consequences. On one side live the privileged, the occupiers – and our hero Joshua.

Pitched as a fable, his crossover novel is set in a city split in two by a vast wall.

The wall by william sutcliffe