A challenging, literary read of two very different narratives seemingly only linked by geography for both start their strange journeys from the Tel Aviv Hilton. That seems to be their only real connection. One story involves a rich American who decides to give away his treasures and walk into the desert in Israel and disappear. The other story involves an author who has writer’s block and is persuaded by a professor of literature to write about the end of Kafka’s life, only this is his second life, his “after life” where he faked his death and escaped to Israel. Both stories contain a certain amount of drama and incident but mostly they are ramblings of philosophy and steams of consciousness. Dense and demanding, you need to read this slowly with lots of breaks to digest the mass of intellectual debate. ~ Sarah Broadhurst
CHOSEN AS BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE OBSERVER, NEW YORKER, NEW YORK TIMES BOOKS REVIEW, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT AND THE TIMES ‘Lucid and exhilarating … A great gift’ New York Review of Books ‘Tantalizes and compels ... A welcome reminder of how a novel can be defiantly and brilliantly novel’ Douglas Kennedy, New Statesman Jules Epstein has vanished: first slowly, then all at once. He begins divesting himself of all of his worldly possessions. Now he’s fallen off the face of the earth, and all the search parties can find is his empty monogrammed briefcase, abandoned in the Judean foothills. In her room at the Tel Aviv Hilton, an American novelist has also left home to undergo a transformation. But when a stranger recruits her for a project involving Kafka, she is drawn into a mystery that will take her on a metaphysical journey and change her in ways she could never have imagined.
