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Lovers and Strangers

Two Novellas

David Grossman author Jessica Cohen translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:19th Jun '06

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Lovers and Strangers cover

This is David Grossman's most accessible book to date - two gripping and profound stories about men and women, love and relationships For fans of Hanif Kureshi's Intimacy, Richard Ford's Men with Women and Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being David Grossman has a huge media profile and this will get lots of attention

Two stories of love and betrayal from Israel's foremost writerThese two novellas concern love. In 'Frenzy', Shaul is convinced that his wife is having an affair. He feverishly imagines her, in every painful detail, with her lover. Esther has never seen the human side of her aloof brother-in-law, but during a night-time journey Shaul unburdens himself, recreating an affair he has never witnessed. Is he mad? Or has he divined the truth? In 'Her Body Knows', Rotem has spent most of her life being angry with her mother, Nilli. Now Nilli is dying and Rotem, who has finally found happiness in London, must return to say goodbye. She arrives with a story about Nilli, full of accusations, empathy, love and forgiveness.

'Grossman's fiction is driven by his obsession with his characters' inner lives, which revolve around delicate, mostly invisible plot lines ... Shaul's fantasy and Rotem's spin on a true story are two sides of one coin: Grossman's passion for the redeeming, unpeeling power of fiction, and his art in creating fiction with such power' Elena Lappin, Independent 'The experience of reading 'Frenzy', the first of two novellas in Lovers and Strangers, is like being locked in a dark, overheated room. The atmosphere is stifling and things might not be as they at first seem. The story is claustrophobic internally and externally both in its physical details and in its emotional intensity. It is an uncomfortable read ... He is an anatomist with a sharp knife' Scottish Sunday Mail 'Absorbing and moving ... [Her Body Knows] is a wonderful story, short and bittersweet' John Harding, Daily Mail 'This pair of dramatic novellas are tough fictions, elegant and near virtuoso in the exactness of the sensuous, physical prose but relentless in their pursuit of emotional truth ... his fiction is lively, intense and unafraid of tackling the most raw corners of a psyche' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

ISBN: 9780747581352

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

272 pages

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