Back to home page - News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop

News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop

not-for-profit - a workers'co-op - committed to social justice | 96 Bold Street, Liverpool L1 4HY - 0151 708 7270

To the End of the Land

by David Grossman - £9.99  Vintage (2011)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9780099546740 | ISBN 10: 0099546744

From one of the world's most acclaimed writers comes a novel of extraordinary power about family life – the greatest human drama – and the cost of war.
 
Ora, a middle-aged mother, is on the verge of celebrating her son Ofer’s release from Israeli army service when he returns to the front for a major offensive. In a fit of preemptive grief and magical thinking, she sets out for a hike in the Galilee, leaving no forwarding information for the ‘notifiers’ who might darken her door with the worst possible news.
 
Recently estranged from her husband Ilan, she drags along an unlikely companion: their former best friend and her former lover Avram, once a brilliant artistic spirit. Avram served in the army alongside Ilan when they were young, but their lives were forever changed one weekend when the two jokingly had Ora draw lots to see which of them would get the few days’ leave being offered by their commander – a chance act that sent Avram into Egpyt and the Yom Kippur War, where he was brutally tortured as a POW. In the aftermath, a virtual hermit, he refused to keep in touch with the family and has never met the boy.
 
Now, as Ora and Avram sleep out in the hills, ford rivers and cross valleys, avoiding all news from the front, she gives him the gift of Ofer, word by word; she supplies the whole story of her motherhood, a retelling that keeps Ofer very much alive for Ora and for the reader, and opens Avram to human bonds undreamed of in his broken world.
 
Grossman’s rich imagining of a family in love and crisis makes for one of the great antiwar novels of our time.

(Price & availability last checked: May 2019)

This website can't tell you if we have this book in the shop or not - to ask, phone us or use the enquiry link below. (We can order most books within 7-10 days, subject to availability.)
  


In booklists: Writers by Surname - G, World Fiction - Middle East, World Fiction - Israel, Peace and War in Fiction,
In categories: Fiction, World - Middle East, Jewish Diaspora, Peace & Human Rights,

© News From Nowhere Co-operative Ltd IP24524R 2004-2024 | Privacy policy | Contact | return to top of page