Price £10.99
Format Paperback
Published December 2004
Length 360 pages
ISBN 9781870015912
ISBN 9781905559442 (ebook)
Click to order
Click to order
The Lover
A.B. Yehoshua
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.
A.B. Yehoshua
Born in Jerusalem in 1936, A.B. Yehoshua was the author of twelve novels, a collection of short stories, and several plays and volumes of essays. He has won prizes worldwide and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages and adapted for film and opera. An outspoken critic of both Israeli and Palestinian policies, he continued to speak about and search for solutions to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Yehoshua died in June 2022, aged 85.
Visit our Remembering A.B. Yehoshua page to read some of the countless tributes and obituaries that have been written to celebrate Yehoshua’s incredible life and career.
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‘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