A WOMAN IN JERUSALEM – A. B. YEHOSHUA
A Woman in Jerusalem
A. B. Yehoshua
trans. by Hillel Halkin
Hardback, April 2006
£12.99, 256pp, 1 870015
98 3
A. B. Yehoshua was nominated for
A suicide bomb explodes in a Jerusalem market. One of the victims is a
migrant worker without any papers, only a salary slip from the bakery
where she worked as a night cleaner. As her body lies unclaimed in the
morgue, her employers are labelled unfeeling and inhuman by a local
journalist. The manager of human resources is given the task of
discovering who she was and why she had come to Jerusalem.
As the image of this once-beautiful dead woman begins to obsess him, the
manager turns this duty into a personal mission – he is no longer just
saving his company’s reputation by trying to discover her identity and
assure her of a dignified funeral. He is now restoring her not only to her
family and country but also to common humanity – whilst at the same time
conquering the hardness of his own heart.
'Mr Yehoshua's
A Woman in Jerusalem is a sad, warm, funny book about
Israel and being Jewish, and one that has deep lessons to impart—for
other people as well as his own.'
The Economist
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'There are human riches here. The manager moves from a man who has given
up on love to one who opens himself to it. And there are strange and
powerful scenes - of the morgue, of the coffin, of the Soviet base where
the manager passes through the purging of body and soul.'
Carole Angier, The
Independent
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'...in A Woman in Jerusalem A.B. Yehoshua has shown once again that
he has the power to surprise, to show us yet another face of his country
and its people, whose lives he explores with delicacy and compassion.'
Natasha Lehrer, Times Literary Supplement
'A moving, unsentimental reckoning with death and renewal.'
Kirkus Review
Read US reviews of A
Woman in Jerusalem
A. B. Yehoshua is one of Israel’s pre-eminent novelists. In the words of
the Booker judges he ‘combines uniqueness and universality and reminds
us irresistibly of the joy of reading.’
Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Yehoshua is the author of The Lover, A Late
Divorce, Five Seasons, Mr. Mani, Open Heart, A Journey to the
End of the Millennium, The Liberated Bride and a collection of short
stories, The Continuing Silence of a Poet. He has been awarded the prestigious Israel Prize
for his lifetime’s creative contribution to Israel, the National Jewish
Book Award in the US and the Jewish Quarterly–Wingate Prize in
the UK.
'In
his fiction, Mr. Yehoshua is subtle, indirect and sometimes visionary, even
phantasmagoric'.
Harold Bloom, The New York
Times
'…there
is something Chekhovian about Yehoshua’s affectionate impartiality
toward his characters, who like Chekhov’s, combine hopeless, maddening
egotism with noble impulses and redeeming outbursts of affection'.
Gabriele Annan, The New York Review
of Books
'He
is a master storyteller whose tales reveal the inner life of a vital,
conflicted nation'.
Wall Street Journal
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an article about A. B. Yehoshua from The Guardian
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an article about A. B. Yehoshua from The Independent
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an article about Yehoshua's life and fiction from Jewish Quarterly
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an article about A. B. Yehoshua from FM4
Article
from a speech given in Berlin, April 2008, published in the Jewish
Chronicle
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.B. Yehoshua
