Ari Eden's life has always been subject to strict rules. In Brooklyn's ultra-Orthodox community, his days are devoted only to study and religious rituals. Ari is very lonely and is only happy when his family moves to sunny Florida. At the new school everything is different, Judaic studies and rituals are also studied there, but overall it is an ordinary and very good school. Ari quickly joins the company of friends, immerses himself in an amazing and previously unknown atmosphere of freedom. His new friends are charismatic, smart, daring, for them life is not limited to any boundaries. And gradually Ari turns from a complex student at a Jewish school into a person who is trying to find his own special path in the world of feelings, desires and temptations. All the heroes of David Hopen's novel are mas, nit Parde a mystical garden, where a person gains true knowledge, approaches God and his own essence hidden under external covers. “Pardes” is a deep, meaningful novel about understanding oneself, about the search for truth, about love, both comprehensive and romantic, about what forces define us: the heady relationships of youth, the charm of inherited traditions, or our hidden desires. David Hopen's debut novel has been compared to Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, but it can be put on a par with other, very different books - John Fowles's The Magus and Donna Tartt's The Secret History, books in which the search for oneself leads into a labyrinth, psychological or philosophical.