James Janko
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James Janko's Novels
Novelist, Poet, Veteran | Author of ‘The Clubhouse Thief’ and ‘What We Don’t Talk About’ | New book ‘The Wire-Walker’ out September 23, 2025
Podcaster Joe Dimino speaks with me about my novel, The Wire-Walker, forthcoming on September 23. Joe's kindness and compassion are refreshing during times when these essential qualities are often missing from national and international discourse. The primary location of my novel is the Balata Refugee Camp in Nablus, Palestine (see photo). famousinterviewswithjoedimino.blogspot.com/2025/09/vietnam-vet-award-winning-novelist.html
The Wire-Walker, forthcoming on September 23, 2025, received a starred review from IndieReader. An excerpt of the review is below:![]()
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“There are many ways to tell the difficult story of the Israeli government’s actions in Palestine, but James Janko’s THE WIRE-WALKER holds together on the strength of the body. Amal’s life as an athlete frames the action, and that gives real heft to the embodied experience of the text. Amal feels out of place in Jaffa not only due to her Palestinian identity, but from within her hungry, skinny body—so much unlike that of her well-fed Israeli friend, Tali. That embodiment also compounds the tension of real or possible violence: when Amal is threatened with torture, the fear is not merely pain but lifelong disability. This embodiment forms a network with the physical fabric of Palestine, so that even the nearest mountain has a body and “looks powerful and lazy, like a giant asleep on its side.” Circus itself has a body, too; it “fits in cracks and crannies, even cages,” just like Amal herself. These rich thematics allow THE WIRE-WALKER to transcend the violence against the Palestinian body—displacement, concentration, bullets and bombs, famine—and invite the reader into that body’s humanity.![]()
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At the beginning of the story, Amal has only ever left the Balata camp through YouTube: she never expects to touch the Mediterranean in her life. As she herself puts it, she has “seen the Mediterranean Sea on a screen the size of [her] palm, but [she] will remain ignorant until [she feels] it on [her] body.” Although there are moments one might expect in a tale about the Palestinian refugee experience—flyovers and drone surveillance, sudden checkpoints, meaningless and cruel bureaucracy—it’s these simple moments situating the human body in a limited physical space that truly convey the horror of the Israeli government’s policies.![]()
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James Janko’s THE WIRE-WALKER is a powerfully imagined and lithely executed tale of moral clarity.”![]()
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader
Forward Review: "The Wire-Walker is an aching, heartbreaking novel about a girl whose sky-high dreams cannot be contained."![]()
––MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER![]()
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Full text of the review:![]()
"In James Janko’s searing novel The Wire-Walker, a talented Palestinian girl defies the limitations of her home to![]()
declare “watch for me in the sky.”![]()
Amal, raised in a West Bank refugee camp, grows up with few joys: a peek of sky, love from her grandfather and mother, a purring cat, and her aspirations toward the circus. She practices wire-walking for six hours a day, posting her feats on the internet.![]()
When Tali, a Tel Aviv juggler, comes upon Amal’s blog, the girls start a friendship pocked by generational pains. Still, Tali helps Amal come to Israel to perform with the Israeli and Palestinian children of the Flying Kids circus. There Amal learns that the stories she made up about the world beyond the camp were partial truths: In Israel and Palestine, everyone has lost someone, and there is no such thing as a safe city. Though raised to regard Israelis as uniform enemies, Amal comes to love those she meets through the circus, including Tali’s mournful mother; Jonathan, a former soldier and performance artist; and her fellow circus performers.![]()
But the violence brewing in Nablus narrows her world once more when Amal spots a foreboding package beneath her![]()
twin Issam’s bed. Amal is a defiant heroine who declares “I will walk till I die and love who I can”—positioning her against Issam, whom she worries has never loved anyone. Driven by compassion but resentful of the privations forced on the camp, she yearns to “walk among ghosts on a thread … and weave things together.” And though saving her family lands her in detention and shuts her off from her Israeli friends forever, she determines never to stop walking on the barrels of tanks.![]()
The Wire-Walker is an aching, heartbreaking novel about a girl whose sky-high dreams cannot be contained."![]()
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (September / October 2025)
During the Nakba, or Catastrophe of 1948, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced. In the Nakba’s aftermath, Avot Yeshurun, an Israeli poet who lost his family in the Holocaust, wrote: “The Holocaust of the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust of the Arabs of Eretz Israel are one Holocaust...The two of them stare each other directly in the face.”![]()
And this one Holocaust continues. The first photo was taken in Palestine in 1948; the second in Gaza, in 2025.![]()
Seven million Palestinians and seven million Jewish Israelis live on a small strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. If justice succeeds, peace will follow. The only possible solution is collective liberation for all people between the river and the sea. At present, the Israeli government, with U.S. backing, has no interest in justice or peace. Author Deena Metzger points out that we need to go beyond traditional politics. “We have to create the life and the ways together that we have asked government to provide for us. The way the people lived before the colonial mind took over. We can create sanctuary for each other and for all beings. We can because we must.”![]()
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Photo credits: The Nakba, 1948, Mr. Hanini; Gaza, 2025, Jaber Badwen.
"I wonder if I will ever be ready to die. I’m glad I’m a girl because most of our martyrs are young men, or boys a few years older than me. I enjoy being alive even on mornings when I can do nothing but sip coffee that burns my stomach. I would like to trade in my body for an iron one, a thick shell, or a body of light that neither bullets nor coffee can harm. Now I think light would be better than iron, far better. Iron can be melted, crushed, broken. Or die in a pile of rust. Light is beautiful. Light is difficult to harm."![]()
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—Amal Tuqan, in The Wire-Walker, by James Janko (forthcoming Sept. 2025)![]()
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@RegalPublishingHouse![]()
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