THE LOVER – A. B. YEHOSHUA

  
THE LOVER
A. B. Yehoshua
trans. by Philip Simpson

New Paperback Edition, December 2004 
£8.99, 360pp, 1 870015 91 6





A. B. Yehoshua was nominated for 





A husband seeks his wife’s lover who has vanished in the turbulence of Israel’s Yom Kippur War. As his quest unfolds and intensifies, the main protagonists are drawn into the search and transformed by it. Through the different perspective 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…

The Lover was A. B. Yehoshua’s first novel and immediately brought him international recognition. It is brilliant, compassionate, highly original and as accomplished as all his later works.


‘Mr Yehoshua’s inventiveness and hallucinatory intensity should be vividly evident. He is a writer who exhibits the rigorous fidelity to his own perceptions that produces real originality’
     Robert Alter, New York Times

‘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

‘Yehoshua’s psychological novel is complex and fascinating, his voices – distinct and striking – represent more than themselves.’
     Publishers Weekly

‘Delicate shifting tensions between political surface and elemental depths…elusive, haunting.’
     The New York Times Book Review

‘one of Israel’s world-class writers’
     Saul Bellow

'It is a disturbing, brilliantly assured novel, and almost thirty years after its appearance it retains a startling originality.' 
     Natasha Lehrer, TLS

'In place of the unifying and optimistic passions of Zionism, [Yehoshua’s] skilful, delicate prose depicts a darker country of insomnia, claustrophobia and disconnectedness, while the clever contrast of perspectives emphasises the vast gulf that can exist between people who supposedly love one another.'
     Francesca Segal, Jewish Chronicle

'In this profound study of personal and political trauma, Yehoshua… evokes Israel’s hallucinatory reality.'                                                                                          
     The Daily Telegraph  


Read an article about A. B. Yehoshua from The Guardian
Read an article about A. B. Yehoshua from The Independent
Read an article about Yehoshua's life and fiction from The Jewish Quarterly
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