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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.

A Tale of Love and Darkness

Tragic, comic and incomparable: an autobiographical epic and a comedie humaine for our times.

One of the funniest, most tragic and most touching books I have ever read. A testament to a family, a time and a place.

One of the most gripping, intense and moving autobiographies I have ever read.

It sweeps across 120 years of family history, weaving a tragi-comic saga of love and books, of Jewish life and immigrant life the world over, and of the universal madness of families. Read it now - I promise you won't read a more brilliant book in a long, long while.

Oz's account of his childhood is often very funny - and then profoundly moving, as he circles slowly round to confront the intolerable pain at the heart of it

If you have 18 euros in your pocket and at least two days left to live, then you should do one more thing to die without regrets, and that is to read this book.

This lyrical saga...succeeds both as a revelatory tale of the artist as young man and a gripping portrait of the young Jewish state itself.

Detailed and beautiful...as he writes about himself and his family, Oz is also writing part of the history of the Jews... We are in the hands here of a capable, practiced seducer.

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

The Same Sea

'There is no novelist writing today who catches the feeling of the moment more surely than Amos Oz' Scotsman

Comic, tragic, erotic and elegiac.  His finest work

A poetic novel of love, family and loss... A work so exquisitely written, so diamond-clear, that critics are already hailing it as Oz's finest work... A writer of revelatory genius

Beautiful and profoundly wise. Very few works of fiction are written with such economy, simplicity and precision that a reviewer simply wants to quote from them... The Same Sea is such a book. Amos Oz has created an unforgettable work of art

A cleansing, poetic, meditative and moving novel

By turns lyrical and earthy, Amos Oz's The Same Sea dances its way through the entanglements of its characters, deftly catching each voice

Short and exquisite... An extraordinary book unlike any he has written. It is a banquet in miniature

‘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.

Judas

Amos Oz's first major novel in a decade – since A Tale of Love and Darkness, which sold over 2 million copies worldwide

Judas is many-layered, thought-provoking and – in its love story – delicate as a chrysalis, this is an old-fashioned novel of ideas that is strikingly and compellingly modern.

A very absorbing addition to his remarkable oeuvre

This book is compassionate as well as painfully provocative, a contribution to some sort of deeper listening to the dissonances emerging from deep within the politics and theology of Israel and Palestine.

After almost two dozen books that track changes in both heart and state with untiring strength and subtlety, the Israeli master has delivered one of the boldest of all his works… Nicholas de Lange, Oz’s distinguished translator, steers these virtuoso transitions between debate and domesticity with unerring skill… Oz can imagine, and inhabit, treachery of every stripe. But he keeps faith with the art of fiction.

A big, beautiful novel… Funny, wise and provoking.

challenging, complex and strangely compelling… The ideas at the novel’s centre have great vitality and force. The philosophical passages bristle with linguistic energy, scriptural references and dense detail, vividly conveyed in Nicholas de Lange’s translation.

It is rich in material to grapple with. Oz engages with urgent questions while retaining his right as a novelist to fight shy of answers: it’s a mark of his achievement that the result isn’t frustrating but tantalising.

A masterpiece: command of the word, mastery of construct, the ability to stimulate all the senses of the reader.

Judas is a rich and thrilling novel, one of the most interesting books published this year.

Amos Oz belongs to the great authors of world literature

Judas is a great novel that only Oz could have written…perhaps his finest work.

Utterly spellbinding ... an especially urgent and profoundly universal work ...Judas is a stately but thoroughly entertaining work, brimming with intricate storylines and characters who are brilliantly alive and get under one's skin. 
 
Oz has written one of the most triumphant novels of his career

Judas is deeply humane, touching and loving. Incredible literature

Once again, Amos Oz has given us an absolute, necessary masterpiece

He’ll no doubt be overlooked for the Nobel Prize yet again next month – this novel shows just how ludicrous that is.

[Judas is] quietly provocative… Aided by Nicholas de Lange’s lucid translation from the Hebrew, it challenges you to think afresh about stories and histories whose interpretations can seem chiseled in stone.

A heart-breaking meditation on roads not taken, and collisions yet to come.

Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year

It is a tribute to the author’s gifts (and to those of his long-time translator Nicholas de Lange) that the novel is so fluid and evocative, at once intellectually stimulating and brimming with humanity… [Oz’s] empathy for human weakness, which has always marked his writing, saturates this extraordinary, rich novel.

Judas deepens the reader’s understanding of conflicts that arguably seem more irresolvable today than they did in 1960… In Lange’s lively translation, the sense of place and period is powerful.

Oz has written so well for so long, the craft shows. Judas reads quickly, and gracefully, without a superfluous page.

Vintage Oz, very atmospheric, and heavy on authentic detail… Enjoy reading the book, and then enjoy peeling back the layers.

Regarded as a potential Nobel laureate… Oz is always worth heeding. It is an important work and as ever Oz’s translator Nicholas de Lange attends to the power, intensity and nuance Oz brings to every idea.

Judas is yet another accomplished work by a master comfortable in his game… accessibly profound as well as deeply thought-provoking. A must for anyone interested in Christianity, politics, and the meaning of friendship. Otherwise, Judas is a great way to meet one of the most important writers in the 21st century at his best.

A novel that grapples with mankind’s most indelible anxieties, from the nature of damnation to the smaller but no less urgent details of tea-making, Judas is an intelligent and hypnotic novel.

The Israeli master’s exceptional final novel 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017 
 
 Shmuel – a young, idealistic student – has abandoned his studies in Jerusalem, taking a live-in job as a companion to a cantankerous old man. But Shmuel quickly becomes obsessed with the taciturn Atalia, a woman of enchanting beauty, who also lives in the house. 
 
As the household’s tangled, tragic past becomes apparent, so too does story behind the birth of the state of Israel. Journeying back into the deep past, Judas is a love story like no other by a master storyteller at the height of his powers. 
 
 
‘A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant’ Simon Schama 
 
‘One of his boldest works of all’ Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times 
 
‘Amos Oz…brought so much beauty, so much love, and a vision of peace to our lives. Please hold him in your hearts and read his books’ Natalie Portman 
 
Judas is the first novel selected for the Amos Oz reading circle established by Natalie Portman.

A Perfect Peace

'Prophetic... a novelist of stature and wisdom' - Daily Telegraph

The assurance of a master... diverse and ironical

Evocative and penetrating... Oz handles his narrative with great agility

A peerless imaginative chronicler of his country's inner and outer transformations

An exquisite thinker... Oz is a rare blast of sanity and intelligence

'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.

To Know A Woman

Mr. Oz demonstrates his usual fluency as a writer. His portraits of Yoel, his mother, his mother-in-law and his daughter are, at once, humorous, melancholy and touching.

This is a book full of hints and echoes, from the past, from literature, from Yoel's former life. It is a remarkable novel, on the one hand a reminder of fiction's capacity to push at the boundaries of the expressible and on the other a meticulous account of one particular character's advance towards wisdom

A writer of extraordinary perception and of a warm humanity, which never slides into sentimentality and never dodges judgement. His dialogue shines with life and he evokes the feel of the physical world, the shimmer of light in the dawn or at evening, wonderfully well. The result is a book, which not only has a firm moral structure, one which poses and explores fundamental questions of human nature and of obligation, but also sparkles with vividly realised renderings of the details of daily life. It is very good indeed

‘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

Fima

'Fima is surely his best book, a celebration of human complexity, and his testament to its achievement' - Scotland on Sunday

There is no novelist writing today who catches the feeling of the moment more surely than Amos Oz

The book eavesdrops on several days in the life of this Jewish Walter Mitty, a Dostoevskian holy fool minus the faith, with the penchant for casuistic sophistry of Bellow's Herzog

This might turn out to be the first entry into Israel's "post-war" literary canon

An outstanding work... a hilarious and moving portrait

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.

Where The Jackals Howl

'Oz deserves his high reputation' - Sunday Telegraph

It rarely happens that literature offers a more profound insight into politics and culture than does news reporting. Amos Oz has performed this rare service

Amos Oz makes the desert a place of jackals and miracles... A strong, beautiful, disturbing book

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.

Black Box

Here is a writer unafraid of displaying the full spectrum of the emotions, and a writer - be it noted - who actually seems to have some faith left in the future

Shows to brilliant effect the tenacity of non-love and the power of separation

A remarkably moving novel, conveying newly the tensions of human needs where politics invades sexual love

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.

Three Stories

The Hill of Evil Counsel

'A perfect book' - Sunday Telegraph

Oz evokes Israeli life with the same sly precision with which Chekhov evoked pre-Revolutionary Russian life

A marvellous ability to transport the reader into a new set of ideas, feelings and fears... The whole book is masterly

An exquisite thinker, Oz is a rare blast of sanity and intelligence

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.

Touch the Water, Touch the Wind

'Beautiful and evocative' - Daily Telegraph

An outstandingly rich book... a pleasure to read

A mixture of fantasy, history, grimness and humour... often beautiful

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.

Unto Death

'As always Amos Oz writes beautifully - cold, clear compelling prose' - Nina Bawden, Daily Telegraph

There is, in his ferocious evocations of suffering and disintegration, realism and insight

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...

Soumchi

A coming-of-age tale from one of Israel's greatest living writers

Here is a writer unafraid of displaying the full spectrum of emotions, and a writer – be it noted – who actually seems to have some faith left in the future

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

Elsewhere, Perhaps

First published in 1966, this is the first novel by one of Israel's most important writers

An exquisite thinker, Oz is a rare blast of sanity and intelligence

The physical circumstances are established with a painter’s skill… It is a rich book, its fruit pressed down and running over

A generous imagination at work. Oz’s language, for all of its sensuous imagery, has a careful and wise simplicity

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.

How to Cure a Fanatic

A landmark work from a celebrated author on how to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict.

A short, clear-sighted and unsentimental masterpiece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

This is a book designed to be taken out into the world... Patient, cogent and an exquisite thinker, Oz is a rare blast of sanity and intelligence. Read, learn and take heart

Nobody has chronicled modern Israel more faithfully than Amos Oz, and these bleak vignettes of village life in a country riddled with anxiety find him at his unsparing best

Amos Oz is the voice of sanity coming out of confusion

Invaluable because of his wisdom and the passionate nature of his engagement

Oz’s cool, measured prose accumulates into a sense of uncertainty in a collection whose portentous ambience is resonant of the unnerving, fabular fiction of Magnus Mills or Haruki Murakami

Invaluable because of his wisdom and the passionate nature of his engagement and his sane effort to find the outlines of an agreement in the Middle East

This brief but resonant book collects the novelist Amos Oz's lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... Sometimes he is so careful not to say anything that would offend either side that he ends up saying very little at all. But perhaps it is that very tact, that respect for the other, that constitutes his most eloquent response to the fanatic

‘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

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

Amos Oz

Praise for Dear Zealots

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

Books by Amos Oz

Articles featuring Amos Oz

Where to start reading Amos Oz’s books

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