Amos Oz - My Michael, translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas De Lange (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005).

ISBN: 9780156031608 | 264 pages | EPUB


One of Amos Oz's earliest and most famous novels, My Michael created a sensation upon its initial publication in 1968 and established Oz as a writer of international acclaim. Like all great books, it has an enduring power to surprise and mesmerize.

Set in 1950s Jerusalem, it tells the story of a remote and intense woman named Hannah Gonen and her marriage to a decent but unremarkable man named Michael. As the years pass and Hannah's tempestuous fantasy life encroaches upon reality, she feels increasingly estranged from him and the marriage gradually disintegrates.

Gorgeously written and profoundly moving, this extraordinary novel is at once a haunting love story and a rich, reflective portrait of place.

Amos Oz (b. 1939) is an Israeli writer, novelist, and journalist. He is also a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. His work has been published in some 41 languages, including Arabic, in 35 countries. Oz has received many honours and awards, among them the Legion of Honour of France, the Goethe Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature, the Heinrich Heine Prize and the Israel Prize. Since 1967, he has been a prominent advocate and major cultural voice of a two-state solution to the IsraeliΓÇôPalestinian conflict.


Reviews

"Slow, thoughtful, self-assured and highly sophisticated, full of the most skillful modulations of tone and texture. A modern Israeli Madame Bovary . . . distinguished by its warmth, its lyricism and remarkable technical control." -- New York Times

"A dazzling, very beautiful, splendidly conceived and composed book." -- New York Review of Books