“Anyone who has had experience of the sad and subtle ways in which human beings torment one another under license of family ties will appreciate the merits of A.B. Yehoshua’s A Late Divorce.” —London Review of Books A powerful story about a family — and a country — in crisis. The father of three grown children comes back to Israel to get a divorce from his wife of many years; another woman, newly pregnant, awaits him in America. Narrated in turn by each family member — husband and wife, sons and daughter, young grandson — the drama builds to a crescendo at the traditional family gathering on Passover Eve. “Each character here is brilliantly realized. Thank goodness for a novel that is ambitious and humane and that is about things that really matter”—New Statesman "A master storyteller whose tales reveal the inner life of a vital, conflicted nation.” — Wall Street Journal

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

A couple, long married, are spending an unaccustomed week apart. Amotz, an engineer, is busy juggling the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, his children, and his grandchildren. His wife, Daniella, flies from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of her older sister. There she confronts her anguished seventy-year-old brother-in-law, Yirmiyahu, whose soldier son was killed six years earlier in the West Bank by “friendly fire." Yirmiyahu is now managing a team of African researchers digging for the bones of man’s primate ancestors as he desperately strives to detach himself from every shred of his identity, Jewish and Israeli. With great artistry, A. B. Yehoshua has once again written a rich, compassionate, rewarding novel in which sharply rendered details of modern Israeli life and age-old mysteries of human existence echo one another in complex and surprising ways

Open Heart is a psychological tour de fource about love and the nature of man's soul. From the opening lines of this first-person narrative, the reader is propelled into the mind of Dr. Benjamin Rubin, an ambitious young internist, who is jockeying for position with the hospital's top surgeons. But it isn't until Benjy learns that his position has been terminated, and that he has been selected to accompany the hospital administrator and his wife to India to retrieve their ailing daughter, that Yehoshua sets his hero on a journey of self-discovery

From Israel’s highly acclaimed author, a novel about a musician who returns home and finds the rhythm of her life interrupted and forever changed

. Noga, forty-two and a divorcee, is a harpist with an orchestra in the Netherlands. Upon the sudden death of her father, she is summoned home to Jerusalem by her brother to help make decisions in urgent family and personal matters — including hanging on to a rent-controlled apartment even as they place their reluctant mother in an assisted-living facility. Returning to Israel also means facing the former husband who left her when she refused him children, but whose passion for her remains even though he is remarried and the father of two. For her imposed three-month residence in Jerusalem, the brother finds her work — playing roles as an extra in movies, television, opera. These new identities undermine the firm boundaries of behavior heretofore protected by the music she plays, and Noga, always an extra in someone else’s story, takes charge of the plot. The Extra is Yehoshua at his liveliest storytelling best — a bravura performance

Yohanan Rivlin, a professor at Haifa University, is a man of boundless and often naïve curiosity. His wife, Hagit, a district judge, is tolerant of almost everything but her husband's faults and prevarications. Frequent arguments aside, they are a well-adjusted couple with two grown sons. When one of Rivlin's students-a young Arab bride from a village in the Galilee-is assigned to help with his research in recent Algerian history, a two-pronged mystery develops. As they probe the causes of the bloody Algerian civil war, Rivlin also becomes obsessed with his son's failed marriage. Rivlin's search leads to a number of improbable escapades. In this comedy of manners, at once deeply serious and highly entertaining, Yehoshua brilliantly portrays characters from disparate sectors of Israeli life, united above all by a very human desire for, and fear of, the truth in politics and life

Winner, Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. An aging Israeli film director has been invited to the pilgrimage city of Santiago de Compostela for a retrospective of his work. When Yair Moses and Ruth, his leading actress and longtime muse, settle into their hotel room, a painting over their bed triggers a distant memory in Moses from one of his early films: a scene that caused a rift with his brilliant but difficult screenwriter — who, as it happens, was once Ruth’s lover. Upon their return to Israel, Moses decides to travel to the south to look for his elusive former partner and propose a new collaboration. But the screenwriter demands a price for it that will have strange and lasting consequences. A searching and original novel by one of the world’s most esteemed writers, The Retrospective is a meditation on mortality and intimacy, on the limits of memory and the struggle of artistic creation