My Michael

Description

A novel about love and loss from one of our greatest living writers One of Amos Oz's earliest and most famous novels, My Michael was a sensation upon its initial publication in 1968 and it has an enduring power to surprise and mesmerize. 'His characters...ride the river of history' New Yorker 'A beautiful work of great depth and lingers in the mind as a lyric song to his country's people as much as a moving love story' Arthur Miller 1950s Jerusalem. Hannah Gonen has just married and is thrilled and pained by her young well-meaning husband, Michael. Haunted by her dreams of two boys who disappeared from Jerusalem after the establishment of the state of Israel, Hannah gradually withdraws from her husband into a private world of fantasy and suppressed desires. This 2015 edition includes an updated introduction from the author.

Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz is the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into over 30 languages, including recently his brilliant semi-autobiographical work, A Tale of Love and Darkness. He has received several international awards, including the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, the Goethe Prize,the Frankfurt Peace Prize and the 2013 Franz Kafka Prize. He lives in Israel.

He has that mixture of lyrical intensity, utter seriousness and capacity for describing life in a few words which characterises some of the best Russian classical authors * Melvyn Bragg * There is no novelist writing today who catches the feeling of the moment more surely than Amos Oz * Scotsman * Amos Oz is one of the finest novelists of this entire period.MY MICHAEL is a beautiful work of great depth and in some indescribable way lingers in the mind as a lyric song to his country's people as much as a moving love story. * Arthur Miller * Amos Oz is a great writer because he tells stories about real people in a way that no-one else can.I not only get joy from reading his work, but as a writer I learn from it, and take example by its excellence, having a great respect for his genius.Finally, these reasons are irrelevant, because there are certain writers in the world who, if you pick up one of their books by chance just as you decide to hang yourself, in despair at not getting very far with one of your own, will save you from doing so.Amos Oz, for me, is one of these. * Alan Sillitoe * Amos Oz is a commanding artist who ranks with the most important writers of our time.MY MICHAEL, an early work, reveals him to have been from the first everything we know him to be today: a visionary fabricator of breathtaking power and wit, as well as a crafty interpreter of difficult souls. * Cynthia Ozick *