Jerusalem is a city electric with tension. There are frequent sparks, as the circuits that cross the city make contact, separate currents suddenly, dangerously flowing into one another. At their least serious, they ignite a monkish fight in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. At their worst, they can set the region alight, as when Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in 2000.

That happened just weeks after David Harris-Gershon and his wife, Jamie, moved to Israel to learn Hebrew and study Jewish law. They went there in hope – with Clinton, Arafat and Barak at Camp David – but, in Harris-Gershon's narrative, they find themselves in a place torn apart by violence. They learn to live with Jerusalem's particular brand of fear: avoiding buses, markets, crowds, obvious "soft targets". They look for a haven and find it in the Hebrew University, a place they believe is immune, where Arabs and Jews and foreigners study together. "We congregated in sunny atriums, lounged on grassy knolls, and ate in large, swank cafeterias without the slightest hesitation." Because in order for life to carry on, there has to be somewhere that feels safe, a respite from the unending vigilance. Even if that feeling might be an illusion.

Which is exactly how it turned out. Harris-Gershon's book, his debut, pivots on the moment his wife and her two friends are blown up in the university cafe. Ben and Marla are killed. Jamie, who had bent down beneath her table to retrieve a textbook, survives, her intestines punctured by one of the metal nuts placed around the bomb.

She is badly burned and her recovery is slow and painful. David is her gatekeeper at the hospital, defending her from the interest an American victim of a terrorist attack inevitably generates – turning away a delegation of Jewish leaders, even the mayor of Jerusalem. The story of that recovery is interrupted by bursts of politics: David explains, for example, that the bomb came days after a potential Hamas ceasefire was scuppered by the Israeli government's assassination of militant leader Salah Shehadeh. The couple find it impossible to rebuild their lives in Israel, and the dreams they had of studying and thriving there are riven by post-traumatic stress disorder and the loss of their friends. As they prepare to leave for good, an airport guard, suspicious of the glove Jamie wears to minimise scarring, has just two words for them when they explain: "Ayzoh miskeinah". "Poor thing."

Back home, the effects of the bomb reverberate, even as Jamie becomes pregnant and the two settle back into the relative safety of life in Washington DC. The psychological consequences for David are more insidious. He suffers from terrible insomnia, obsesses to an unnatural degree about the safety of their newborn, and experiences a feeling of suffocation that regularly overwhelms him. It is therapy that convinces him to confront the detail of the attack, which in turn leads him to discover in a newspaper article that Mohammed Odeh, who planted the bomb, has expressed remorse.

If the terrorist is sorry, does that mean he's human, rather than a machine, an agent of fate? It is this question that sets David on a course back to Israel, determined to meet Odeh and his family, to understand what led to the attack that maimed his wife and killed his friends.

Stories of trauma and reconciliation are not unusual. Neither are the memoirs of victims – indirect or otherwise – of terrorist attacks. How should we weigh these accounts critically, churlish as that can feel? If the writing is good enough, the smallest disappointments and rejection can be worth reading about. If it isn't, then the ordeal itself had better be fairly dramatic. Rarely, there is a book that meets both criteria; Christabel Bielenberg's The Past is Myself manages it, as does Brian Keenan's An Evil Cradling.

Harris-Gershon's effort doesn't scale those heights. His suffering, though intense and heartfelt, is not that of someone held hostage for four-and-a-half years. His writing, which is competent and entertaining, does not linger in the mind. There are flashes of pretension that may be explained by the fact the book was written as part of a creative writing programme. Jerusalem is an intense place, but it doesn't deserve this kind of portentous treatment: "[My prayer] rose into the … night, surrounded by the chanted supplications in Hebrew and Arabic making their way to the dimly lit heavens high above the Old City, circling and weaving to meet the day and the fate of that day as the cityscape winked alive."

Or, writing of the terrorist's decision to detonate his bomb because of the actions of the Israeli government: "He would … walk away. The phone in his pocket. The call to be made. A call made because of calls that were made by others." There are odd incidents of drama that feel like substitutes for the twists and turns of a true thriller: the moment he almost elbows the woman sitting next to him on a plane in the face; the point at which a Swiss army knife falls out of his pocket as he's entering a Palestinian neighbourhood.

And though the arc of the story leads you to expect that there might be a final meeting with Odeh himself, that does not happen. The stone wall of Israeli bureaucracy gets in the way. The encounter he has with Odeh's mother, brother and children feels a little anticlimactic, though it's difficult not to be moved by the moment the bomber's children scamper in to accept gifts David has brought from the Jerusalem branch of Toys R Us.

Harris-Gershon has written a brave and impressive book, despite its faults. He is definitely one of the good guys, in among so much enmity and reaction. The scripted dialogues he has with himself, or with the authors of academic papers he's reading, are deftly done and funny. And though his account ultimately falls between small-scale psychological memoir and epic of restorative justice, there's enough intelligence and spark to suggest that there is more and better to come.