Exodus

Leon Uris's sweeping novel follows the fight to create the modern state of Israel. At its center is a scheme to bring Jewish refugees out of a detention camp on Cyprus and into Palestine, then under British mandate, where the nascent Jewish community was struggling for survival and independence.

The story moves between the camps, the ports, and the Palestinian settlements, and it follows a cast of Jewish fighters, survivors of the Holocaust, and the foreign volunteers who join them. Among the figures are Ari Ben Canaan, a resistance leader, and Kitty Fremont, an American nurse drawn into the cause.

Uris drew his plot from the real 1947 voyage of the ship Exodus, which tried to carry refugees to Palestine and was turned back by the British. The novel was later adapted into a 1960 film directed by Otto Preminger and starring Paul Newman.