When they found her, after having disappeared for three days, Sarai Lilienblum was found sitting inside the “world’s largest crater” wearing her burgundy housecoat, sipping a martini. Nobody knew how she got there. And Sarai wouldn’t say. A robotics teacher and an inveterate tinkerer, it seems Mrs. Lilienblum used her absence to create a cloud-making machine employing a red vacuum cleaner. The contraption would suck up desert sand and more astonishingly create clouds that produced rain.

The story opens in a backwater of Southern Israel, in a desert, a village known as The Cliff. Here, Boaz Lilienblum and son Eli struggle to eke out a living running a tourist lodge. Wife Sarai Lilienblum spends her spare time inventing things, which she often displays on her front lawn. Lovingly perceived to be a little batty, her son believes his mom is “a few fries short of a Happy Meal”. None of Mrs. Lilienblum gadgets have ever amounted to anything. The lodge stays afloat with the help of thrill-seeking volunteers, the so called “McMurphy tourists” drawn to the lodge in search of a mysterious hiker. Purportedly lost in the desert, a decade ago, they delude themselves, McMrurphy is alive. The volunteers keep the lodge running. Business is not great!

Naomi, the eldest daughter, left The Cliff community at fourteen to study at a boarding school in Jerusalem to assume a high-tech life. Now she returns home amid family chaos, deeply concerned over her mother’s mental acuity, exacerbated by her mother’s mysterious disappearance and latest invention—a cloud-making factory.

To everyone’s amazement, a video of Mrs. Lilienblum’s whereabouts blows up the internet. Tamara, a reporter sent to cover the story shares the strange video with Eli and Naomi. Sitting in the midst of a nearby crater, they see Mrs. Lilienblum holding a red vacuum cleaner sucking up desert sand… a cloud over her head producing raindrops falling on her palm. Thousands of investors offer millions to buy Mrs. Lilienblum idea. Rain in the desert? Could that be true?

Investors give the newly formed Cliff community–the self-named, “Cloudies”–153 days to recreate Mrs. Lilienblum’s invention. They eagerly aspire to convince billionaire Ben Gould, Mrs. Lilienblum’s machine can form rain from sand and electrify interest in a new startup. Will her cloud factory make the desert bloom?

A debut novel by the talented Iddo Gefen, Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory is a howling satire, a hilarious spoof that ricochets off the Israeli startup culture and its frenetic tourist industry. A neuro-cognitive researcher diagnosing Parkinson’s disease, winner of the Sammy Rohr prize for Jewish literature for his fantastic short story anthology, Jerusalem Beach, Gefen has outdone himself in the zany madcap, implausible adventure that could only be conceived in the greatest startup “invention nation,” Israel.