Discover the books by Amos Oz
Amos Oz (Author)
‘A writer of revelatory genius’ Guardian
Following the bizarre accidental death of his wife, Israeli secret service agent Yoel Ravid retires to the suburbs with his daughter, mother and mother-in-law.
After a lifetime of uncovering other people's secrets he is forced to look back at the lies he has told himself; at the desolate enigma of his wife's life and death; his years of service to the state and the riddle of his daughter's behaviour.
‘Humorous, melancholy and touching’ New York Times
Amos Oz (Author)
Unto Death contains two beautiful short novels linked by death and destruction.
Crusade is set in 1096 - a year of sinister omens. Count Guillaume of Touron sets out on a crusade to Jerusalem and on the way he serves his God by killing any Jews he meets. But will the Count find the peace of mind he seeks when he faces the terrible realities of war in the Holy Land?
In Late Love Oz portrays an elderly professor living alone in Tel Aviv, a man neither loving nor loved. His last mission is to expose the plight of his fellow Russian Jews and alert the people of Israel to the conspiracy that threatens them. But nobody wants to listen...
Amos Oz (Author)
Where the Jackals Howl is prize-winning author Amos Oz's first collection of stories. On publication it received immediate critical acclaim and revealed Oz to be a master craftsman probing the emotional depths of his characters.
The lives of ordinary Israelis are set against the backdrop of community life in a Kibbutz. The fate of these individuals, their drives, ambitions and idiosyncrasies, are grounded by the physical and social structure of their community as Oz portrays their world as a microcosm of the wider world.
Amos Oz (Author)
As the Germans advance into Poland in 1939, Elisha Pomeranz, a Jewish mathematician and watchmaker, escapes into the wintry forest, leaving behind his beautiful, intelligent wife, Stefa.
After the war, having evaded the concentration camps, they begin to build new lives - Stefa in Stalin's Russia and Elisha in Israel, where, as they seek their reunion, another war is brewing.
Amos Oz (Author)
'Evocative and penetrating. Oz handles his narrative with great agility’ Sunday Times
One day a man may just pick up and walk out. What he leaves behind stays behind. What's left behind has nothing to stare at but his back
In the winter of 1965, Yonaton Lifshitz decided to leave the kibbutz on which he was born, and his sterile marriage, to start a new life. But as he engineers his escape, the arrival of Azariah Gitlin, a keen new recruit, brings about a painful reconciliation of their different destinies in a society struggling with changing realities.
Amos Oz (Author)
A powerful and tragicomic blend of politics and personal destiny, Black Box records in a series of letters the wrecked marriage of Ilana and Alex. Seven years of silence following their bitter divorce is broken when Ilana writes to Alex for help over their wayward and illiterate son, Boaz, and old emotional scars are reopened.
Amos Oz (Author)
The Hill of Evil Counsel is a fusion of history and imaginative narrative, re-creating the twilight world of Jerusalem during the fading days of the British Mandate. In these three closely linked stories, Oz vividly evokes the stifling atmosphere of impending crisis as real personalities rub shoulders with fictional characters whose hopes and fears are hauntingly portrayed.
Amos Oz (Author)
Fima, our eponymous hero, is a receptionist at a gynaecology clinic. A preposterous, yet curiously attractive figure, he spends his hours fantasising about solving the nation's problems and pursuing women with equivocal success.
Amos Oz (Author)
In the summer of 1989, at Tel-Kedar, a small settlement in the Negev Desert, the long time love affair between Theo, a sixty-year-old civil engineer, and Noa, a much younger school teacher, is slowly disintegrating. When a pupil of Noa's dies under difficult circumstances, the couple and the entire town are thrown into turmoil.
With characteristic subtlety and brilliance, Amos Oz tells a wry and tender story of frustrated ambition and love which is never quite fulfilled - bringing together stormy intrigue in a small community with gentle humour and an intimate anatomy of a relationship.
Amos Oz (Author)
,
Nicholas de Lange (Translator)
‘One of the greatest prose writers in contemporary fiction’ The Times
In the last years of British rule in Jerusalem, a lonely, bookish Israeli boy befriends a British soldier in this tale of friendship in the face of enmity.
Jerusalem 1947.
British soldiers patrol the streets, and bullets and bombs are a nightly occurrence.
Caught up in the fervour and unrest against the occupying forces,12-year old Proffy dreams of being an underground fighter. But some of his dreams are less heroic.
Temptation lurks everywhere for the youth who wants to be a man – and betrayal not far behind.
Amos Oz (Author)
‘In a world full of hype, noise, and confusion, the simple lucidity of The Same Sea is totally unexpected’ New York Times
An intimate, everyday tale of unrequited love and grief
Nadia is dead. Her widower, Albert, comforted by his old friend Bettine, is trying to put his life back together. His son, Enrico, has gone to find himself in Tibet. Enrico's girlfriend, Dita, is being friendly and daughterly to Albert – but his responses are less platonic. Meanwhile, Dita has another lover, and a slightly repellent film producer lusts after her too.
Through these intersecting triangles of desire and loss comes a novel that is surprising, heart-breaking, funny, poetic and simply unmissable.
Amos Oz (Author)
Discover Amos Oz’s most iconic work in this extraordinary memoir that is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation
*OVER 2 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE*
‘A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant’ Simon Schama
Amos Oz's remarkable, moving story takes us on a seductive journey through his childhood and adolescence, along Jerusalem's war-torn streets in the 1940s and '50s and into a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. Caught between them is one small boy with the weight of generations on his shoulders.
Oz dives into 120 years of family history and paradox, the saga of a Jewish love-hate affair with Europe that sweeps from Vilna and Odessa, via Poland and Prague, to Israel. Farce and heartbreak, history and humanity make up this story of clashing cultures and lives, of suffering and perseverance, of love and darkness.
‘Oz’s greatest work…not only his autobiography, but in a way the biography of Israel before it was created’ David Grossman, Observer
Amos Oz (Author)
,
Nicholas de Lange (Translator)
An unnamed author waits in a bar in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night. He is there to give a reading of his work but as he sits, bored, he begins to conjure up the life stories of the people he meets. Later, when the reading is done he asks a woman for a drink. She declines and the author walks away, only to climb the steps to her flat, later that night. Or does he?
In Amos Oz's beguiling, intriguing story the reader never really knows where reality ends and invention begins...
Amos Oz (Author)
,
Nicholas de Lange (Translator)
A teenage son shoots himself under his parents' bed. They sleep that night unaware he is lying dead beneath them.
A stranger turns up at a man's door to persude him that they must get rid of his ageing mother in order to sell the house.
An old man grumbles to his daughter about the unexplained digging and banging he hears under the house at night.
As each story unfolds, Amos Oz, builds a portrait of a village in Israel. It is a surreal and unsettling place. Each villager is searching for something, and behind each episode is another, hidden story. In this powerful, hynotic work Amos Oz peers into the darkness of our lives and gives us a glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday existence.
By the winner of the 2013 Franz Kafka Prize, previous winners of which include Philip Roth, Ivan Klima, Elfriede Jelinek, Harold Pinter and John Banville.
Amos Oz (Author)
‘A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant’ Simon Schama
Amos Oz, the internationally acclaimed author of A Tale of Love and Darkness and Judas, grew up in war-torn Jerusalem, where as a boy he witnessed first-hand the poisonous consequences of fanaticism.
In How To Cure a Fanatic Amos Oz analyses the historical roots of violence and confronts truths about the extremism nurtured throughout society. By bringing us face to face with fanaticism he suggests ways in which we can all respond.
From the author of A Tale of Love and Darkness and Man Booker International Prize shortlisted Judas.
‘He was the conscience of Israel’ Roger Cohen, New York Times
Amos Oz (Author)
Eight interlinked family dramas set on an Israeli kibbutz from the masterful storyteller behind A Tale of Love and Darkness
‘On the kibbutz it’s hard to know. We’re all supposed to be friends but very few really are’
Ariella, unhappy in love, confides in the woman whose husband she stole.
Nahum, a devoted father, can’t find the words to challenge his daughter’s promiscuous lover.
The old idealists deplore the apathy of the young, while the young are so used to kibbutz life that they can’t work out if they’re impassioned or indifferent.
In this short story collection Amos Oz reveals the secrets and frustrations of the human heart
‘Lucid and heartbreaking’ Guardian
Amos Oz (Author)
A young boy coming of age in British-occupied Jerusalem trades away one possession after another, only to find something much more wonderful – his first love
When Soumchi, an eleven-year-old boy growing up just after World War II, receives a bicycle as a gift from his Uncle Zemach, he is overjoyed – even if it is a girl's bicycle.
Ignoring the taunts of other boys in his neighbourhood, he dreams of riding far away from them, out of the city and across the desert, toward the heart of Africa. But first he wants to show his new prize to his friend Aldo…
‘A lavishly gifted writer’ New York Times
Amos Oz (Author)
The Kibbutz of Metsudat Ram lies in the valley of Jordan, close to the border. Old and young, happy and discontented, the settlers go about their lives as the artillery rumbles in the distance and the war planes shriek overhead.
Among them are Reuven, the school teacher whose true calling is poetry, his teenaged daughter, the capricious Noga, and Ezra, the Kibbutz’s truck-driver.
As the seasons pass, so too do storms of love and passion, conflict and misunderstanding, gossip and scandal – all threatening to tear apart a community held together by necessity and idealism.
Amos Oz (Author)
,
Sondra Silverston (Translator)
In a village far away, deep in a valley, all the animals and birds disappeared some years ago. Only the rebellious young teacher and an old man talk about animals to the children, who have never seen such (mythical) creatures. Otherwise there's a strange silence round the whole subject. One wretched, little boy has dreams of animals, begins to whoop like an owl, is regarded as an outcast, and eventually disappears.
A stubborn, brave girl called Maya and her friend Matti, are drawn to explore in the woods round the village. They know there are dangers beyond and that at night, Nehi the Mountain Demon comes down to the village. In a far-off cave, they come upon the vanished boy, content and self-sufficient. Eventually they find themselves in a beautiful garden paradise full of every kind of animal, bird and fish - the home of Nehi the Mountain Demon. The Demon is a pied piper figure who stole the animals from the village. He, too, was once a boy there, but he was different, mocked and reviled, treated as an outsider and outcast.
This is his terrible revenge, one which has punished him too, by removing him from society and friendship, and every few years he draws another child or two to join him in his fortress Eden, where he has trained the sheep to lie down with the wolves, and where predators are few. He lets the two children return to the village, telling them that one day, when people are less cruel and his desire for vengeance has crumbled, perhaps the animals might come back...
