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Reading lists

The ultimate Eurovision-inspired reading list

More Than I Love My Life

More Than I Love My Life... is a profound testament to the emotional power of fiction and shows why some critics regard Grossman as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Immaculately translated by Jessica Cohen, this is another extraordinary novel from Grossman, a book as beautiful and sad as anything you'll read this year.

Unforgettable . . . This adds another remarkable achievement to Grossman's long list.

In More Than I Love My Life he [Grossman] tells a sombre and affecting tale... [a] delicately crafted novel, crisply translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen.

[Grossman gives] vivid voice to each of the characters as they navigate their pain, both present and past... Grossman's 12 previous novels and five volumes of non-fiction have brought him renown on both sides of the Atlantic. This book will earn him more.

[A] concisely devastating novel... [Grossman] has demonstrated again that the novel - elastic, expansive, amenable to painful fragmentation - can provide a space for the most harrowing and resistant material.

Nobody can see the political in the personal like David Grossman. He is an interpreter of hearts and an investigator of social forces. Every book he writes is a revelation.

A moving exploration of the power of love, secrets and forgiveness. A sweeping narrative rooted in a deep faith in humanity.

Grossman is surely now the greatest living Israeli writer. And his new novel, More Than I Love My Life, is arguable his best yet... what makes the book so powerful and complex is not just the daughters' refusal to forgive, but the way Grossman lets the story unfold.

A meditation on love, on memory, and on the power of storytelling.

An epic, deeply moving novel about the power of love and loving with courage - from the Man Booker International Prize-winning author of A Horse Walks into a Bar 
 
 On a kibbutz in Israel in 2008, Gili is celebrating the ninetieth birthday of her grandmother Vera, the adored matriarch of a sprawling and tight-knit family. But festivities are interrupted by the arrival of Nina: the iron-willed daughter who rejected Vera's care; and the absent mother who abandoned Gili when she was still a baby. 
 
 Nina's return to the family after years of silence precipitates an epic journey from Israel to the desolate island of Goli Otok, formerly part of Yugoslavia. It was here, five decades earlier, that Vera was held and tortured as a political prisoner. And it is here that the three women will finally come to terms with the terrible moral dilemma that Vera faced, and that permanently altered the course of their lives. 
 
 More Than I Love My Life is a sweeping story about the power of love and loving with courage. A novel driven by faith in humanity even in our darkest moments, it asks us to confront our deepest held beliefs about a woman's duty to herself and to her children. 
 
 'Grossman's work resonates with emotional intelligence, humanity and truth' Irish Times

A BBC Economics Collection

This is Capitalism

Five eye-opening BBC documentaries about the hidden economic framework that surrounds our every move. 
 
Capitalism is all around us, affecting almost everything we do and impacting our daily lives in myriad ways. This comprehensive collection takes an in-depth look at this all-pervasive economic system, examining its triumphs and disasters and revealing how it puts money and markets at the centre of our world. 
 
In the explosive 10-part series The New Age of Capitalism, Newsnight's David Grossman probes the factors driving the turbo-charged growth in contemporary commerce. Exploring aspects ranging from the 'intangible economy' and AI to the trillion-dollar tech giants, he asks key questions about the way modern capitalism works, and the consequences for society. 
 
Insecure Overachievers sees leaders of elite City firms divulging the secret epidemic of anxiety and insecurity among elite professionals. Exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, they are driven by a deep belief in their own inadequacy, fostered by a competitive work culture that takes advantage of their vulnerabilities. 
 
The Bailout tells the compelling story of the race against time to agree a rescue plan to save Britain's banks from going bust. Told by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, with contributions from Alistair Darling, Mervyn King and Robert Peston, this is a blow-by-blow account of how events unfolded during one incredible week in October 2008. 
 
The Money Clinic goes behind the scenes as families and couples open up about their finances and their feelings with a relationship counsellor. In frank, intimate discussions, they learn how to deal with the financial issues that are coming between them, and receive practical tips on managing both their cash and the emotional side of money. 
 
And in Our House, we meet young Brighton couple Tacita and Charlie, who are desperate to buy their first home - but a property on the south coast is out of their reach. We follow them as, guided by a team of financial experts, they travel back in time to 1968, 1979, 1988, 1997 and 2009 to see which decade would have given them the best chance to get on the housing ladder. 
 
Copyright © 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd 
 
The New Age of Capitalism 
Presented by David Grossman 
Produced by Diane Richardson and Matthew Chapman 
Editor: Hugh Levinson 
With: Jonathan Haskel; Stian Westlake; Tim Wu; James Williams; Diane Coyle; Andrew McAfee; Dr Asa Cusack; Professor Ricardo Hausmann; Fran Boait; Professor Sir Charles Bean; Brad Katsuyama; Professor Donald MacKenzie; Edward Luttwak; James Bloodworth; Joshua Kurlantzick; Dr Linda Yueh; Rana Foroohar; Joshua Ryan-Collins; Adam Lashinsky; Barry Lynn 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 10-21 September 2018 
 
Insecure Overachievers 
Presented by Professor Laura Empson of London's Cass Business School 
Produced by Jonathan Brunert 
With: Jeremy Newman; Alex Michel; Jessica Carmody; Gerry Grimstone, Baron Grimstone of Boscobel; David Morley; Yuval Atsmon; Nigel Jones 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 24 September 2018 
 
The Bailout 
Presented by Gordon Brown 
With: Alistair Darling; Mervyn King; Robert Peston; Shriti Vadera, Baroness Vadera; Kirsty McNeill; Tom Fletcher; Nicolas Sarkozy; Sir John Kingman 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 6 October 2018 
 
The Money Clinic 
Presented by Ruth Alexander 
Produced by Smita Patel 
Editor: Emma Rippon 
Relationship counsellor: Dee Holmes from Relate 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 3-24 August 2019 
 
Our House 
Narrated by Katherine Press 
Written and produced by Rosamund Jones and Paul Kerley 
Production co-ordinator: Janet Staples 
Sound engineer: James Beard 
With: Charlie Chatwood; Tacita French; Jonathan Cribb; Professor Sharon Collard; Professor Claire Langhamer 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 26-30 August 2019

Five eye-opening BBC documentaries about the hidden economic framework that surrounds our every move. 
 
Capitalism is all around us, affecting almost everything we do and impacting our daily lives in myriad ways. This comprehensive collection takes an in-depth look at this all-pervasive economic system, examining its triumphs and disasters and revealing how it puts money and markets at the centre of our world. 
 
In the explosive 10-part series The New Age of Capitalism, Newsnight's David Grossman probes the factors driving the turbo-charged growth in contemporary commerce. Exploring aspects ranging from the 'intangible economy' and AI to the trillion-dollar tech giants, he asks key questions about the way modern capitalism works, and the consequences for society. 
 
Insecure Overachievers sees leaders of elite City firms divulging the secret epidemic of anxiety and insecurity among elite professionals. Exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, they are driven by a deep belief in their own inadequacy, fostered by a competitive work culture that takes advantage of their vulnerabilities. 
 
The Bailouttells the compelling story of the race against time to agree a rescue plan to save Britain's banks from going bust. Told by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, with contributions from Alistair Darling, Mervyn King and Robert Peston, this is a blow-by-blow account of how events unfolded during one incredible week in October 2008. 
 
The Money Clinic goes behind the scenes as families and couples open up about their finances and their feelings with a relationship counsellor. In frank, intimate discussions, they learn how to deal with the financial issues that are coming between them, and receive practical tips on managing both their cash and the emotional side of money. 
 
And in Our House, we meet young Brighton couple Tacita and Charlie, who are desperate to buy their first home - but a property on the south coast is out of their reach. We follow them as, guided by a team of financial experts, they travel back in time to 1968, 1979, 1988, 1997 and 2009 to see which decade would have given them the best chance to get on the housing ladder. 
 
Copyright © 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd 
 
The New Age of Capitalism 
Presented by David Grossman 
Produced by Diane Richardson and Matthew Chapman 
Editor: Hugh Levinson 
With: Jonathan Haskel; Stian Westlake; Tim Wu; James Williams; Diane Coyle; Andrew McAfee; Dr Asa Cusack; Professor Ricardo Hausmann; Fran Boait; Professor Sir Charles Bean; Brad Katsuyama; Professor Donald MacKenzie; Edward Luttwak; James Bloodworth; Joshua Kurlantzick; Dr Linda Yueh; Rana Foroohar; Joshua Ryan-Collins; Adam Lashinsky; Barry Lynn 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 10-21 September 2018 
 
Insecure Overachievers 
Presented by Professor Laura Empson of London's Cass Business School 
Produced by Jonathan Brunert 
With: Jeremy Newman; Alex Michel; Jessica Carmody; Gerry Grimstone, Baron Grimstone of Boscobel; David Morley; Yuval Atsmon; Nigel Jones 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 24 September 2018 
 
The Bailout 
Presented by Gordon Brown 
With: Alistair Darling; Mervyn King; Robert Peston; Shriti Vadera, Baroness Vadera; Kirsty McNeill; Tom Fletcher; Nicolas Sarkozy; Sir John Kingman 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 6 October 2018 
 
The Money Clinic 
Presented by Ruth Alexander 
Produced by Smita Patel 
Editor: Emma Rippon 
Relationship counsellor: Dee Holmes from Relate 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 3-24 August 2019 
 
Our House 
Narrated by Katherine Press 
Written and produced by Rosamund Jones and Paul Kerley 
Production co-ordinator: Janet Staples 
Sound engineer: James Beard 
With: Charlie Chatwood; Tacita French; Jonathan Cribb; Professor Sharon Collard; Professor Claire Langhamer 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 26-30 August 2019

The Smile Of The Lamb

The first Israeli novel written about the occupation of the West Bank, by one of the most influential writers of his generation.

An extraordinary achievement...moving, many-layered, powerful, yet written with beautiful delicacy of touch, is a work of redemption... Combining the compassionate wisdom of the moralist with a true artist's creative imagination, this book deserves the widest possible audience

Bold, grand, mad, an astonishing meditation on art, religion, love, politics and war, despatched in language which is funny, ferocious and enraptured

A courageous novel, the first attempt by an Israeli author of the post-1967 generation to come to terms with the consequences of the Occupation, to articulate how 'the conqueror is also the conquered, and injustice has teeth in its tail'

Extreme, enormous, almost embarrassingly good, a first novel whose very last page somehow fuses together the political and spiritual currents running through modern day Israel

At once sensitive, humane, elegiac and devoid of optimism, save a vague faith in love

Masterful irony and passion... the sustained poetic intensity of many passages is impressive

From its very first pages one is aware of Grossman's potential range and originality...Khilmi, an Arab storyteller, is the novel's great imaginative narrative achievement... What a rare pleasure to read a novel in which the novelist's narrative and ideas are so gripping, they are worth arguing about! Here we have authentic talent

Grossman has made a habit of peeling away the camouflage that obfuscates Israel's more painful wounds

His fiction is earnest, sympathetic, human and highly readable

Uri and Katzman are Israeli soldiers occupying a Palestinian village in the West Bank. Uri is idealistic and full of hope, feels the injustice of the occupation keenly, and becomes close to Khilmi, the village storyteller. Katzman on the other hand is 'a contracted muscle' - he has taught himself not to feel. And Shosh, Uri's wife, daughter of liberal immigrant parents and juvenile psychiastrist, is succumbing to her own struggles with power and truth. 
 
When Khilmi's adopted son is killed in a 'security operation' and when Uri discovers how far deception and injustice have penetrated into his own life, their reactions are drastic and unforseen.

The Book Of Intimate Grammar

A stunning novel - a searing psychological portrait of a child's descent into madness

It's a rare achievement for the magic of childhood to be treated so weightily

When the Israeli writer David Grossman's See Under: Love was published...he was compared legitimately to Kafka, Grass, Márquez and Joyce....David Grossman's own intimate grammar will speak to anyone who was ever twelve

It is an achievement that is full of charm and courage

Like [Virginia] Woolf, Grossman is uncanny at reproducing an experience from the inside out...the writing reminds you of the great, solemn mystery of literature, what the poet Czeslaw Milosz calls 'the human possibility of being someone else

Mr. Grossman's balance between the poetic and the profane is perfect....[The Book of Intimate Grammar] is See Under: Love's stylistic twin: the beauty and intelligence of the writing are dazzling....It can be read at once, as a tale of magic realism, a parable about the damage left in the wake of the Holocaust, a psychological portrait of a child's descent into madness, and, finally, as a comical but searing indictment of the Jewish family

Eleven years old and on the cusp of puberty, Aron Kleinfeld is precocious, imaginative - the leader of his gang of friends. But his bar mitzvah is looming, his friends are all hitting puberty and Aron, terrified and revolted by what he sees around him, enters a state of arrested development. He stops growing, retreats from the world, and is imprisoned in the body of a child for three long years. While Israel inches towards the Six-Day War, and his friends cross the boundary between childhood and adolescence, Aron remains in his child's body, spying on the changes that adulthood wreaks as, like his hero Houdini, he struggles to escape the trap of growing up.

Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

Sleeping on a Wire

A ground-breaking and profundly important portrayal of the Arab population in Israel

Intelligent, sympathetic, resonant and accessible

Outstanding... Unblinkingly harsh, this journey is also, in its sheer honesty and decency, a work of hope

The Yellow Wind established Grossman as one of Israel's finest political writers. His latest examination of the Palestinian tragedy is of equal quality, sympathetic without being patronising, sensitive to the point of pain

A writer of passionate self-honesty, unafraid to ask terrible questions

A fine, sympathetic book... Its insights reverberate far beyond the Middle East

Grossman has continued the honourable tradition of giving voice to the vocally disenfranchised

Grossman is an acute and sceptical observer, reckoning with the double and triple languages his subjects use to negotiate their lives in Israel, wrestling honourably with his own reactions

He is a good and honest and comprehending listener

Israel: Jewish state and national homeland to Jews the world over. But a fifth of its population is Arab, a people who feel themselves to be an inseparable part of the Arab nation, most of which is still technically at war with the State of Israel. 
 
In the summer of 1991 David Grossman set out on a journey into the world of Arab citizens of his country. Sleeping on a Wire is an account of what he found. It is about men and women fighting to find a voice, to pick out the pulse of their own identity in a land that doesn't seem to be theirs. He has not written about open conflict. Rather it is a story of ferment beneath the surface, and an intensifying bitterness which can only exacerbate the troubles of the Middle East.

The Yellow Wind

A book that changed how we think about the Israeli-Palestine conflict: a book that knows that the enemy is not the Palestinian or the Israeli but the extremist and fanatic on either side

Beautifully written and highly perceptive

Even the most cautious readers – and even the most hostile – are bound to learn something about the conflict that they never knew before…something deep and achingly, damningly, true

A brilliant, searing examination of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank…beautiful, passionate, and profoundly disturbing

Written with tremendous conviction and power

First published in 1988, The Yellow Wind is Israeli novelist David Grossman’s impassioned account of what he observed on the West Bank in early 1987: not only the misery of the Palestinian refugees and their deep-seated hatred of the Israelis, but also the moral cost of occupation for both occupier and occupied. With the unstinting eye of the investigative journalist combined with the humane compassion of the novelist, Grossman channels the myriad human voices of the conflict, weaving them into an indelible account of one of the most intractable tragedies of modern times.

A Horse Walks into a Bar

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017 
 
One of the world’s great writers venturing into exciting new territory – a heartbreaking, visceral novel about a stand-up comedian

Unrelentingly claustrophobic… The violence that A Horse Walks Into A Bar explores is more private and intimate. Its central interest is not the vicious treatment of vulnerable others but the cruelty that wells up within families, circulates like a poison in tight-knit groups, and finally turns inward against the self… Strategic weaving together of manic humour and tears… Searing and poignant.

Brilliant, blistering… With Dovaleh, Grossman has created a character who’s captivating and horrific and a stand-up routine that’s disgusting and authentically human. I can hardly say how the book achieves its bewitching effects. It all happened so fast.

Unless pop lyricists have the lock on the Nobel prize in literature from now on, then a leading future candidate must be David Grossman.

Much of it is extremely funny, but it’s also tightly controlled and carefully paced… Few writers hold a more unflinching mirror up to Israeli society than Grossman… [A Horse Walks into a Bar] is a work of sombre brilliance and disquieting rage, an unsparing exploration of the seductive spell of escapism and “the corruption that is in cynicism.”

This is a virtuoso piece of writing, a whirlwind of laughter and tears that sucks you in and makes you hold your breath.

A writerly tour de force that would be unbearably painful, were it not also so generously humane.

David Grossman tells a story that is so emotional that you feel obliged to look away from time to time or to even put away the book once in a while so you can breathe again and so you can prepare yourself for the next confrontation with yourself and the world around you.

David Grossman’s new novel runs on a high voltage line, operated by a frantic, mesmerising and almost unbearable energy. An ongoing feeling of astonishment accompanies you throughout the read, and it is linked to Grossman’s bravado and to his innovation as a storyteller… A Horse Walks into a Bar…is unlike anything Grossman has written, or anything I have read. It is a packed explosive, multi-resonant, daring and exciting.

Grossman’s new novel depicts a cruel demeaning stand-up act…and yet this is not a book about the violence of man but rather on the human inside - and this is what turns Grossman to a truly great author.

A fine Israeli writer… It takes an author of Mr Grossman’s stature to channel not a failed stand-up but a shockingly effective one.

Grossman's new novel is a…bravura performance… This remarkable book, rendered into English by Grossman's veteran translator Jessica Cohen, teases the reader as nakedly as the comedian does his crowd. On every page, we encounter an implied invitation to set the book down but the performer's struggle to muffle and at the same time release the howls from his soul is too profoundly haunting.

With masterly control and brilliant timing (it’s not easy to write stand-up, let alone translate it into another language, as Jessica Cohen has done so well here) Grossman has Dovaleh tell his life story, starting with the night of his conception… It may be Grossman’s finest novel yet.

With this raw and fiercely emotional book Grossman, one of Israel’s finest writers, steps into tricky new territory.

An unexpected delight… This is a novel, for our new Age.

A Horse Walks into a Bar is a delight.

With A Horse Walks into a Bar, Israeli writer David Grossman accomplishes the seemingly impossible and transposes an entire stand-up show into a novel. Shocking and intense, bleak but sensitive, this affecting tale is much more than novelty… A novel that probes the fullest absurdities of the human condition and our capacities to reconstitute suffering.

The thrust though is the comedian’s monologue, by turns tragic and hilarious as he subjects his audience to his story.

This is yet another masterwork from the wonderful Israeli novelist whose work resonates with emotional intelligence, humanity and truth.

Bold, brash, angry and heartbreakingly tender, with flurries of exasperated humour, here is a novel to take one by surprise… A demanding and gloriously rewarding novel, in it Grossman confronts the business of being alive.

A sensitive and deeply emotional account of a past-prime comedian…  This book is an immersive read for both the fans and haters of the stand-up comedy, but tread carefully if you’re not up for an emotional rollercoaster.

This book is a compelling study of the relationship between artist and spectator, and how suffering feeds into art, and he’s made of it a bravura performance… Extraordinary.

A haunting, intense and Man Booker International prize-winning novel from a great writer.

Incredibly fast paced, and the dialogue comes at you like a machine gun… It is powerful in its own right.

Abrasive, unexpected and eventually heartbreaking, it is a masterclass in characterisation and structure, and it beat off some exceptionally strong competition to win the prize… A Horse Walks into a Bar is quite unlike any other Grossman book except in one important respect: it’s another masterpiece.

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017 
 
The setting is a comedy club in a small Israeli town. An audience that has come expecting an evening of amusement instead sees a comedian falling apart on stage; an act of disintegration, a man crumbling, as a matter of choice, before their eyes. They could get up and leave, or boo and whistle and drive him from the stage, if they were not so drawn to glimpse his personal hell. Dovaleh G, a veteran stand-up comic – charming, erratic, repellent – exposes a wound he has been living with for years: a fateful and gruesome choice he had to make between the two people who were dearest to him. 
 
A Horse Walks into a Bar is a shocking and breathtaking read. Betrayals between lovers, the treachery of friends, guilt demanding redress. Flaying alive both himself and the people watching him, Dovaleh G provokes both revulsion and empathy from an audience that doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry – and all this in the presence of a former childhood friend who is trying to understand why he’s been summoned to this performance.

Falling Out of Time

Following the magisterial To the End of the Land, the universally acclaimed Israeli author brings us an incandescent fable of parental grief - slim, elemental, a powerfully distilled experience of understanding and acceptance, and of art’s triumph over death.

Grossman raises questions about the nature of grief and mourning and demonstrates, once again, his rare gift of storytelling, a realm where loss is not merely an absence but a life force of its own.

A harrowing testimony to grief… It’s a measure of Grossman’s clarity of thought and his theatrical timing that one reaches its end and feels, in some small way, glad to have been in his characters’ company however grim the road they travel.

On the page the book resembles a play, or a prose poem, possessing at times the qualities of a religious or mystical text... Falling Out of Time is short, and clearly a deeply personal book, but its importance and impact ought not to be underestimated.

The greatest Israeli writer of his generation.

At once more universal and more personal than anything he has written before.

Slim in dimension but as solid as sculpted rock... Around Grossman’s region, countless parents have had to endure the premature death of children and so enter this “land of exile”. Although it grows from a private, incomparable ordeal, this noble fable speaks for all of them.

In this book of sorrows, Grossman captures every shade of grief and guilt. There is very little good writing about bereavement; Falling out of Time is as true and as powerful as CS Lewis's great A Grief Observed.

Strange and passionate... What grips is the emotional suspense that Grossman articulates: that remembering and forgetting can be as bad as each other, that finding a way to understand what happened risks cheapening it.

Fusing prose and verse in the form of a drama, it's a searing glimpse of the most intimate grief but also hints at the possibility of redemption through the act of writing.

A significant new departure in literature.

Heart-wrenching, moving and worth numerous reads.

A small miracle of literary complexity and invention, which grows on re-reading.

Falling Out of Time is a novel that will strike a chord with anyone who has suffered a loss and struggled to move beyond it

A strange, harrowing, deeply soulful and, in moments, quite unexpectedly beautiful book

In Falling Out of Time, David Grossman has created a genre-defying drama - part play, part prose, pure poetry - to tell the story of bereaved parents setting out to reach their lost children. It begins in a small village, in a kitchen, where a man announces to his wife that he is leaving, embarking on a journey in search of their dead son.The man - called simply the 'Walking Man' - paces in ever-widening circles around the town. One after another, all manner of townsfolk fall into step with him (the Net Mender, the Midwife, the Elderly Maths Teacher, even the Duke), each enduring his or her own loss. The walkers raise questions of grief and bereavement: Can death be overcome by an intensity of speech or memory? Is it possible, even for a fleeting moment, to call to the dead and free them from their death? Grossman's answer to such questions is a hymn to these characters, who ultimately find solace and hope in their communal act of breaching death’s hermetic separateness. For the reader, the solace is in their clamorous vitality, and in the gift of Grossman’s storytelling – a realm where loss is not merely an absence, but a life force of its own.

To The End of the Land

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.

Extraordinary, impassioned... To the End of the Land is without question one of the most powerful and moving novels I have ever read

It is tricky to set out the scale of Grossman's achievement without resorting to reviewers' clichés. He has aimed as high as it is possible to do in a novel which deals with the great questions of love, intimacy, war, memory and fear of personal and national annihilation-and has overwhelmingly achieved everything.

This is a great novel, a rare example of a book that lives up to its billing, its emotional depth and humanity balanced by formidable formal control and pacing of the chronological sequence, the text rendered into an English that mostly finds the cadence and associative range of the original Hebrew... To The End Of The Land is, quite literally, unforgettable

This is a book of overwhelming power and intensity, David Grossman's masterpiece. Flaubert created his Emma, Tolstoy made his Anna, and now we have Grossman's Ora - as fully alive, as fully embodied, as any character in recent fiction. I devoured this long novel in a feverish trance. Wrenching, beautiful, unforgettable

There are some writers in whose words one recognizes the texture of life. David Grossman is such a writer. He is a master of the emotionally accurate and significant. His characters don't so much lie on the page as rise before the reader's eyes, in three dimensions, their skin covered in prose that both stabs with insight and shines with compassion

Grossman's use of language - emotive, poignant, sometimes bewitching - draws the reader in and Ora becomes a truly sympathetic character. An eloquent and captivating read, and quite possibly a landmark novel in Israeli fiction.

Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I've ever read. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being

Honeyed and portentous, rhythmic and often breathless, the prose sweeps the reader into a pool of shimmering reflection

Grossman's account of Ora and Avram's lengthening flight from their painful lives is a tour de force.

David Grossman explores how words illuminate the darkest landscapes and how lives can be shaped and preserved through stories

Sorrow and magnificence go hand in hand in Israeli writer David Grossman's intimate view of lives held hostage to the threat of violence and danger...potent, moving and emotionally raw. To the End of the Land is unforgettable

The book is full of incidents of magical thinking of the kind that anyone who has ever tried in vain to protect someone they love will recognise. This is a powerful epic of love, loss and loyalty

...terrific...this is a powerful and memorable novel, which movingly evokes the strains of war and peace in one household...British people are often accused of failing to see things from the Israeli point of view. To the End of the Land sears this perspective onto the memory.

...extraordinary epic of love, war and sorrow...Stunning-brilliantly written and beautifully constructed.

...a deeply serious, utterly honest work about the state of Israel.

David Grossman writes with a vulnerability that is free of fear, poetic and powerful, sensual and angry, passionate and gently. He writes not only for his survival but for ours as well.

...a powerful and memorable novel, which movingly evokes the strains of war and peace...British people are often accused of failing to see things from the Israeli point of view. To the End of the Land sears this perspective onto the memory.

Stunning-brilliantly written and beautifully constructed.

Is a heartbreaking, riveting portrait of modern Israel. A family story, a rich character study, a story of war. Unmissable.

First-rate writing about the craziness of modern-war.

Breathtaking skill...an extraordinary emotional charge.

David Grossman laid bare the flayed soul of Israel

Articulates the pain and complexity of being born in Israel so powerfully that it will unquestionably be studied by future generations.

Times Literary Supplement, Christmas round up

He is the finest living novelist I have read. His work is visceral and clear-headed. Though I loved Franzen's Freedom, Grossman's novel is better

To define David Grossman's masterly new novel as the ultimate anti-war oeuvre would not do it justice...To the End of the Land is richer and more complex than a chronicle of war. It is an intimate portrayal of a woman and mother, Ora, who has been compared to Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna...With characters with whom the reader can empathise, a powerful if disturbing theme and an element of suspense and the unknown, Grossman's novel, while not easy to read, is well worth the effort

Further proof the Very Long Novel is in rude health with David Grossman's fine book about the seemingly endless conflict between Israel and Palestine

Movingly evokes the strains of war and peace in one Israeli household

Grossman's soaring, wrenching journey through Israel ... grapples with the largest of themes: memory and identity, community and nationhood.  Yet through its picaresque plot, it always remains a mother's story and a family romance... Grossman aims high, digs deep, and returns from inner and outer voyages with darkly glittering jewels of insight

To the End of the Land is a novel of relationships: personal, moral and political: all reviewed against a muted landscape of pain, threat and hostility... Grossman list his youngest son Uri in the final hours of the second Lebanon war and his personal connection to the trauma of conflict adds weight to this substantial work

Ora, a middle-aged Israeli mother, is about to celebrate her son Ofer's release from army service when he returns to the front for a major offensive. Instead of waiting at home for the 'notifiers' who could arrive at any moment to tell her of her son's fate, she sets off for a hike in Galilee, leaving no forwarding address. If a mother is not there to receive the news, a son cannot die, can he? 
 
Recently estranged from her husband, Ora drags along an unlikely companion: their former best friend and her former lover Avram, the man who in fact turns out to be her son's biological father. As they sleep out in the hills, ford rivers and cross valleys, Ora recounts, step by step and word by word, the story of her son's birth, life and possible death, in one mother's magical, passionate and heartbreaking attempt to keep her son safe from harm.

See Under Love

Innovative and daring retelling of the horrors of Jewish history, likened to The Tin Drum and One Hundred Years of Solitude

One of the most ambitious, generous, beautiful, indispensable books I've been fortunate enough to read

See Under: Loveis one of the most disturbing novels I've ever read...When I was already well into it, I'd circle it warily before picking it up again . . . then fall instantly under its spell, for it is wickedly readable

This novel is so innovative, yet at the same time so readable, that I can only say that it gives the lie to that critical cliche. It is a tour de force of pure storytelling, and a demonstration of both the need for story and the limits of all particular stories. I consider it a triumph

Momik, the only child of two survivors, is brought up in Israel by a family seeking to ignore the past. No-one will explain to him what life was like 'Over There' or what the 'Nazi Beast' is. His 9-year-old mind imagines a Nazi Beast hiding in the cellar, waiting to feed on Jews. Momik increasingly shields himself from all feeling and attachment. But through the stories his great-uncle tells him-the same stories he told the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp-Momik, too, becomes "infected with humanity." 
 
See Under: Love is a luminously imaginative and profoundly affecting work.

David Grossman

The greatest Israeli writer of his generation

There are some writers in whose words one recognizes the texture of life. David Grossman is such a writer. He is a master of the emotionally accurate and significant

Written with passion and moral urgency… [The Thinking Heart] reminds us that many of the best Israeli writers have been the moral conscience of their nation

On Israel and Palestine

*Winner of the Heinrich Heine Prize for Literature* 
 
A hundred and fifty years of conflict. What does that do to a person’s soul, to the spirit of a nation? To both the occupied and the occupier? 
 
International Booker Prize-winning Israeli novelist David Grossman has spent decades campaigning for peace in Israel and Palestine. But after October 7th 2023, a day marking the biggest loss of Jewish life in this century, he retreated inwards to ask himself difficult and necessary questions about his beloved nation: 
 
How could this massacre have happened? 
How could the Netanyahu government, tangled in its web of scandals, fail to protect its citizens? 
And did October 7 and the war that followed take with it their last hope of a two-state solution? 
 
In eleven essays David Grossman traces the years leading up to that day and the ensuing war through a string of failures by a morally bankrupt party clinging to power. He documents the struggle being fought on both sides between those committed to conflict, and the many who simply want to live in peace. 
 
Ultimately, Grossman arrives at the most important question of all: Will there ever be a lasting peace in the region?

David Grossman

Books by David Grossman

Articles featuring David Grossman

The ultimate Eurovision-inspired reading list

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