Elsewhere, Perhaps

Description

First published in 1966, this is the first novel by one of Israel's most important writers The Kibbutz of Metsudat Ram lies in the valley of Jordan, close to the border. Old and young, happy and discontented, the settlers go about their lives as the artillery rumbles in the distance and the war planes shriek overhead. Among them are Reuven, the school teacher whose true calling is poetry, his teenaged daughter, the capricious Noga, and Ezra, the Kibbutz's truck-driver. As the seasons pass, so too do storms of love and passion, conflict and misunderstanding, gossip and scandal - all threatening to tear apart a community held together by necessity and idealism.

Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz was the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into over forty languages, including his brilliant semi-autobiographical work, A Tale of Love and Darkness. His last novel, Judas, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017 and won the Yasnaya Polyana Foreign Fiction Award. He 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 died in December 2018.

An exquisite thinker, Oz is a rare blast of sanity and intelligence * Observer * The physical circumstances are established with a painter's skill... It is a rich book, its fruit pressed down and running over * Sunday Times * A generous imagination at work. Oz's language, for all of its sensuous imagery, has a careful and wise simplicity * New York Times *