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Reading lists

Where to start reading Amos Oz’s books

Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest

Now reissued in beautiful new backlist style, a wonderful, haunting fable with a dark undertow, for adults and children, from the bestselling author of A Tale of Love and Darkness.

Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz is the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into over 30 languages, including recently his brilliant semi-autobiographical work, A Tale of Love and Darkness. He has received several international awards, including the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, the Goethe Prize,the Frankfurt Peace Prize and the 2013 Franz Kafka Prize. He lives in Israel.

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...

Scenes from Village Life

Now reissued in beautiful new backlist style, a novel in stories from 'one of the greatest writers at work in the world' (Scotsman)

This is a dark book, with a dark vision of contemporary Israel… The whole, rich, disturbing mixture makes one feel as if something dark is digging away at the foundations, something unnameable ready to emerge. It is one of the most powerful books you will read about present-day Israel.

These stories have both force and mystery, and they cast a quiet spell

A powerfully bleak portrait of loneliness, confusion and cracked bonds

These stories, in their humanity, may do more for Israel than any of the decisions we have been led to expect of its leaders in the months to come

I enjoyed Amos Oz's Scenes From Village Life a great deal... it explores what is universal, what is entirely idiosyncratic, about daily life in Israel away from the obvious conflicts

Oz's characters might be drawn from Chekhov: their lives seem an irresoluble muddle of sorrow, baffled hopes and missed chances; his compassion for them makes the reader care deeply about them, too. This is a wise, beautiful and enduring book

The stories resemble an echo chamber of recurring themes, steeped in a strangeness and danger that lingers on like a dream'

Admirably rendered in English by Oz's longtime translator, Nicholas de Lange, these linked stories prove achingly melancholy... It is like a symphony... There is, in each story, a particular chord or strain; but taken together, these chords rise and reverberate, evoking an unease so strong it's almost a taste in the mouth... Scenes From Village Life is a brief collection, but its brevity is a testament to its force. You will not soon forget it

Oz beautifully captures the interplay of tensions in each character.

Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz was the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into over forty languages, including his brilliant semi-autobiographical work, A Tale of Love and Darkness. His last novel, Judas, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017 and won the Yasnaya Polyana Foreign Fiction Award. He received several international awards, including the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Frankfurt Peace Prize and the 2013 Franz Kafka Prize. He died in December 2018.

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.

Rhyming Life and Death

Now reissued in beautiful new backlist style, reality and fiction blend in an ingenious short novel from the celebrated author of A Tale of Love and Darkness

A master class in interlocking character sketches, and a fable on the themes of sex, death and writing pitched somewhere between the fictional universes of JM Coetzee and Milan Kundera

Delightful...a meditation, on the art of writing, the relationship between literature and life, between life and death...the work of a master. A book you are likely to return to

A playful and meditative examination of old age, literary posterity and the juxtaposition between literature and real life

Beautifully balanced between humour and sorrow

In this slim yet weighty new novel, Oz explores the sparring between reality and fantasy, shedding light on the mysterious inner workings of the creative process itself, as if presenting an X-ray of an author's mind at work

Read this book.  When you are done, read it again.  Each time you'll find something different, I promise

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...

Between Friends

In eight interlinked family dramas, master storyteller Amos Oz reveals the secrets and frustrations of the human heart, now reissued in beautiful new backlist style

Lucid and heartbreaking… Explores the always uncertain relationships between men and women, parents and children, friends and enemies, in a clear, clipped language perfectly suited to the laconic tone of the narrative and impeccably rendered into English by Sondra Silverston

Between Friends is arguably something new, a collection of stories, but so interlinked by theme, setting and its rolling cast that it boasts the sense, scope and unity of a novel… The writing, tight and delicate, is technically breathtaking

Oz is brilliant at compact images in which a small action expresses a complexity of unarticulated emotion

There’s a beautiful economy and simplicity to Oz’s storytelling

Oz lifts the veil on kibbutz existence without palaver. His pin-point descriptions of individuals and spaces…are pared to perfection in order to resonate. His people twitch with life

Engaging collection… Beautiful, spare prose

Presents us...with a complex and melancholic vision of people stuggling to transcend their individuality for the sake of mundanely idealistic goals

All Israeli life is here, rendered in loving detail

This poignant, often heartbreaking, collection evocatively captures life in a kibbutz

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

Panther In The Basement

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.

Countries need writers as their voices of conscience; few have them. Israel has Oz

One of the greatest prose writers in contemporary fiction

Amos Oz is a great writer because he tells stories about real people in a way that no one else can

He has that mixture of lyrical intensity, utter seriousness and capacity for describing life in a few words which characterises some of the best Russian authors

There are times when you are reminded what it means to be in the presence of a genius...with Amos Oz you have to add wisdom and hope too

‘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.

Don't Call It Night

'Vivid, convincing and haunting' New York Times

Oz's sense of place brings Faulkner to mind. His quest for ideals is Tolstoyan, his hapless, decaying characters evoke thoughts of Bellow, but their intensity of feeling, their obsession with elementary issues is Dostoevskian

A commanding artist who ranks with the most important writers of our time

Oz has imposed order on a literary landscape that, at least to his overseas readers, seethes with conflict

An elegiac, exquisite portrait of a middle-aged love affair

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

A passionate polemic against dogmatism and defeatism... Oz refuses to give up on democracy, on Israel or on justice for Palestinians.

Letters from a Divided Land

‘His parting shot at opposing the storm of fanaticism breaking over our times’ Financial Times 
 
 Dear Zealots is an essential collection of three essays written out of a sense of urgency, concern, and a belief that a better future is still possible. It touches on the universal nature of fanaticism and its possible cures; the Jewish roots of humanism and the need for a secular pride in Israel; and the geopolitical standing of Israel in the wider Middle East and internationally. 
 
Amos Oz boldly puts forward his case for a two-state solution in what he calls ‘a question of life and death for the State of Israel’. Wise, provocative, moving and inspiring, these essays illuminate the argument over Israeli, Jewish and human existence, shedding a clear and surprising light on vital political and historical issues, and daring to offer new ways out of a reality that appears to be closed down. 
 
'Concise, evocative... a brilliant book of thoughts and ideas' David Grossman

Dear Zealots

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A passionate polemic against dogmatism and defeatism... Oz refuses to give up on democracy, on Israel or on justice for Palestinians.

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