Books by A.B. Yehoshua
The Only Daughter: A Novel
“An old-fashioned book, free of cynicism, encroaching technology and intricate plotting, but imbued with a heartfelt and optimistic view of humanity—in other words, a book filled with feeling and moral values.”—New York Times Book Review
From the internationally acclaimed, award-winning Israeli author, a stunning novel that brilliantly illuminates a young girl’s crisis of faith and coming-of-age in Italy.
Rachele Luzzato is twelve years old when she learns that her father is gravely ill. While her family plans for her upcoming bat mitzvah, Rachele finds herself cast as the Madonna in her school’s Christmas play. Caught between spiritual poles, struggling to cope with her father’s mortality, Rachele feels as if the threads of her everyday life are unraveling.
A diverse circle of adults is there to guide Rachele as she faces the difficult passing of childhood, including her charismatic Jewish grandfather, her maternal Catholic grandparents, and even an old teacher who believes the young girl might find solace in a nineteenth-century novel. These spiritual tributaries ultimately converge in Rachele’s imagination, creating a fantasy that transcends the microcosm of her daily life with one simple hope: an end to the loneliness felt by an only daughter.
In this wondrous story A. B. Yehoshua paints a warm and subtle portrait of a young girl at the cusp of her journey into adulthood.
Copies
-
$26.99
The Tunnel
by William H. Gass, A. B. Yehoshua, A.B. Yehoshua
From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed Israeli author, a suspenseful and poignant story of a family coping with the sudden mental decline of their beloved husband and father—an engineer who they discover is involved in an ominous secret military project
Until recently, Zvi Luria was a healthy man in his seventies, an engineer living in Tel Aviv with his wife, Dina, visiting with their two children whenever possible. Now he is showing signs of early dementia, and his work on the tunnels of the Trans-Israel Highway is no longer possible. To keep his mind sharp, Zvi decides to take a job as the unpaid assistant to Asael Maimoni, a young engineer involved in a secret military project: a road to be built inside the massive Ramon Crater in the northern Negev Desert.
The challenge of the road, however, is compounded by strange circumstances. Living secretly on the proposed route, amid ancient Nabatean ruins, is a Palestinian family under the protection of an enigmatic archaeological preservationist. Zvi rises to the occasion, proposing a tunnel that would not dislodge the family. But when his wife falls sick, circumstances begin to spiral . . .
The Tunnel—wry, wistful, and a tour de force of vital social commentary—is Yehoshua at his finest.
Copies
No copies available.
The Tunnel
by William H. Gass, A. B. Yehoshua, A.B. Yehoshua
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE
A FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD
From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed Israeli author, a suspenseful and poignant story of a family coping with the sudden mental decline of their beloved husband and father—an engineer who they discover is involved in an ominous secret military project
Until recently, Zvi Luria was a healthy man in his seventies, an engineer living in Tel Aviv with his wife, Dina, visiting with their two children whenever possible. Now he is showing signs of early dementia, and his work on the tunnels of the Trans-Israel Highway is no longer possible. To keep his mind sharp, Zvi decides to take a job as the unpaid assistant to Asael Maimoni, a young engineer involved in a secret military project: a road to be built inside the massive Ramon Crater in the northern Negev Desert.
The challenge of the road, however, is compounded by strange circumstances. Living secretly on the proposed route, amid ancient Nabatean ruins, is a Palestinian family under the protection of an enigmatic archaeological preservationist. Zvi rises to the occasion, proposing a tunnel that would not dislodge the family. But when his wife falls sick, circumstances begin to spiral . . .
The Tunnel—wry, wistful, and a tour de force of vital social commentary—is Yehoshua at his finest.
Copies
No copies available.
The Tunnel
by William H. Gass, A. B. Yehoshua, A.B. Yehoshua
Thirty years in the making, William Gass's second novel first appeared on the literary scene in 1995, at which time it was promptly hailed as an indisputable masterpiece. The story of a middle aged professor who, upon completion of his massive historical study, "Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany," finds himself writing a novel about his own life instead of the introduction to his magnum opus. "The Tunnel" meditates on history, hatred, unhappiness, and, above all, language.
Copies
No copies available.
Friendly Fire: A Duet
A couple, long married, are spending an unaccustomed week apart. Ya'ari, an engineer, is busy juggling the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, his children, and his grandchildren. His wife, Daniela, flies from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of her older sister. There she confronts her anguished brother-in-law, Yirmiyahu, whose soldier son was killed six years earlier in the West Bank by “friendly fire." Yirmiyahu is now managing a team of African researchers digging for the bones of man’s primate ancestors as he desperately strives to detach himself from every shred of his identity, Jewish and Israeli.
With great artistry, A. B. Yehoshua has once again written a rich, compassionate, rewarding novel in which sharply rendered details of modern Israeli life and age-old mysteries of human existence echo one another in complex and surprising ways.
Copies
No copies available.
The Lover
A husband seeks his wife's lover who is lost in the turbulence of Israel's Yom Kippur War. As the story of his quest unfolds and grows in intensity, the main protagonists are drawn into the search and are transformed by it: through the different perspectives of husband, wife, teenage daughter, and young Arab emerges a complex picture of the uneasy present, the tension between generations, between Israel's past and future, between Jews and Arabs. 'We see an Arab and an Israeli locked into a debate of proximity, alikeness, mental hatred, that Yehoshua's superb ability to render both presences relieves of all sentimentality. What I value most in The Lover is a gift for equidistance - between characters, even between the feelings on both sides.'Alfred Kazin, New York Review of Books
Copies
No copies available.
Open Heart (Harvest Book)
“Seductively heady . . . Ingeniously explores the unfathomable mysteries of the heart.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
A young Israeli intern vying for the position of surgeon learns that his internship has been terminated and he has been chosen to accompany the hospital administrator and his wife on a trip to India. There, the couple intend to retrieve their ailing daughter and bring her back to Israel. The long journey awakens urges in the young doctor that will threaten his carefully contained world.
Juxtaposing Western realism and Eastern mysticism, Open Heart is an “astonishing work about love in all its forms. [One that] speaks across the barriers of translation and culture to readers everywhere” (Washington Post Book World).
“At times incantatory and magical, sometimes disturbing, and often astonishing . . . Entertains the mind while it captivates the soul.” —Seattle Times
"Mind-expanding and poetic, a book that will stay with you long after you have turned its final page.” —New York Times
Copies
No copies available.
The Liberated Bride
Yochanan Rivlin, a professor at Haifa University, is a man of boundless and often naïve curiosity. His wife, Hagit, a district judge, is tolerant of almost everything but her husband's faults and prevarications. Frequent arguments aside, they are a well-adjusted couple with two grown sons.
When one of Rivlin's students-a young Arab bride from a village in the Galilee-is assigned to help with his research in recent Algerian history, a two-pronged mystery develops. As they probe the causes of the bloody Algerian civil war, Rivlin also becomes obsessed with his son's failed marriage.
Rivlin's search leads to a number of improbable escapades. In this comedy of manners, at once deeply serious and highly entertaining, Yehoshua brilliantly portrays characters from disparate sectors of Israeli life, united above all by a very human desire for, and fear of, the truth in politics and life.
Copies
No copies available.
The Extra
“Engaging . . . Yehoshua is a master in his visual sketches of scenes.” —New York Times Book Review
“[A] finely etched new novel . . . A marvel of a book.” — Haaretz?
“Four and a half decades after his first book’s publication, his twentieth shows Yehoshua’s writing chops are undiminished and his content fearlessly topical.” — New York Journal of Books
Noga, forty-two and divorced, is a harpist with an orchestra in the Netherlands. Upon the sudden death of her father, she is summoned home to Jerusalem by her brother to help make decisions in urgent family and personal matters. Returning also means facing a former husband who left her when she refused him children, but whose passion for her remains even though he is remarried and the father of two.
For her imposed three-month residence in Israel, her brother finds her work as an extra in movies, television, and opera. These new identities undermine the firm boundaries of behavior heretofore protected by the music she plays, and Noga, always an extra in someone else’s story, takes charge of the plot.
The Extra is Yehoshua at his liveliest storytelling best—a bravura performance.
“Rich in reflection and personal truth . . . Masterful.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Award-winning Israeli novelist Yehoshua gives moral force, even grandeur, to the inevitable push-pull of one family’s life.” — Library Journal, starred review
Copies
No copies available.
The Story of Crime and Punishment (Save the Story)
You should go to a street corner and get down on your knees and tell the whole world: "I have sinned."
Raskolnikov is a poor student living in St Petersburg. Desperate to escape his poverty, he murders his pawnbroker and her sister, and flees with a few watches and bits of jewellery. Although at first nobody suspects him, his own conscience plagues him incessantly - and it isn't long before a highly intelligent police detective by the name of Petrovich begins to have his doubts about Raskolnikov's innocence, and is determined to make him confess.
Dave Eggers says, of the series: "I couldn't be prouder to be a part of it. Ever since Alessandro conceived this idea I thought it was brilliant. The editions that they've complied have been lushly illustrated and elegantly designed."
Copies
No copies available.