Rachele Luzzato is 12 years old when she learns her father is seriously ill. While her family are looking forward to her Bat-Mitzvah, Rachele's teachers happen to cast her as the Madonna in the school's Christmas play. Pulled in opposing directions, Rachele feels the threads of her life begin to untangle. With the fear of losing her father, various forces compete to guide and take care of Rachele: from her charismatic Jewish grandfather, to her Catholic grandparents on her mother's side; and even an old teacher who believes the young girl might take solace from a nineteenth-century novel. These disparate influences ultimately blend in Rachele's imagination to create a fantasy that transcends the religious and cultural conflicts of her everyday life with one simple hope: to end the loneliness felt by an only daughter. With great subtlety and tenderness, A.B. Yehoshua paints a portrait of a young girl at the beginning of her journey into adulthood.

Yehuda Kaminka, a retired teacher, returns to Israel from the U.S. to divorce his estranged wife who is in a mental asylum, having tried to kill him a few years earlier. The impending divorce of their parents throws into turmoil the lives of the couple's three children and grandson, revealing the complexity of their relationships. Yehuda's nine days, leading up to Passover, are remembered by different members of the family: A.B. Yehoshua's brilliance reveals itself in these different voices, each a minor masterpiece. A picture slowly emerges of what happened as memories are revived, hopes expressed and dreams articulated. The narrative gathers pace as Yehuda's visit draws to an end and he changes his mind about the divorce agreement.

Zvi Luria has begun to lose his memory. At the beginning he only makes small mistakes, forgetting first names and taking home the wrong child from his grandson's kindergarten, but he knows that things will only get worse. He's 73 and a retired road engineer. His neurologist hints at the path his illness might take and suggests ways of comabtting it, with the help of his wife Dina. Dina, a respected paediatrician, is keen for him to return to meaningful activity, and suggests he volunteers to work with his old colleagues at the Israel Roads Authority. This is how Luria finds himself at the Ramon Crater in the Negev desert planning a secret road for the army with the son of his former colleague. But there's a mystery about a certain hill on the route of this road. Who are the people living there and why are they trapped? And should the hill be flattened and the family evicted, or should a tunnel beneath it be built? With humour and great tenderness, A.B. Yehoshua depicts the love between Luria and his wife as they confront the challenges of his illness. Just when Luria's sense of identity becomes more compromised, then does he find himself, enabling a rich meditation on the entwined identities of Israeli Jews and Palestinians and on the nature of memory itself. Yehoshua weaves a masterful story about a long and loving marriage, interlaced with biting social commentary and caustic humour.

An ageing film director named Yair Moses has been invited to the Spanish pilgrim city of Santiago de Campostela for a retrospective of his early work. As he and Ruth, his leading actress and longtime muse, settle into their hotel, Moses notices the painting over his bed depicting a classical legend of an old prisoner nursing at the breast of a young woman. For the first time in decades, he recalls the infamous scene from one of his early films which led to his estrangement from his difficult but brilliant screenwriter, Trigano, who was also Ruth's former lover. Throughout the retrospective, Moses is unsettled, straddling the past and the present, and upon his return to Israel, he decides to find the elusive Trigano and propose a new collaboration. But the screenwriter demands a price for such a reconciliation, one that will have strange and lasting consequences. Searching, intellectual, and original, The Retrospective is a probing meditation on mortality, the limits of memory, and the struggle of artistic creation by one of the world's most esteemed writers.

A husband and wife spend a week apart over the Hanukkah holiday: Daniela visits her widowed brother-in-law in Africa to revive memories of her sister with him but, in ways she cannot begin to understand, he has been left wounded and raging after an earlier tragedy - a death by friendly fire. Her husband, Amotz Ya'ari, stays behind in Israel, rushing between his engineering company, their grandchildren and his father. Life in the Ya'ari family is full, complicated and humorous, but beyond it lies a fragile society deeply uneasy with itself and badly scarred, with each family harbouring its own ghosts. Ever-creative, A.B. Yehoshua's short, interwoven chapters create a duet-like narrative which penetrates deeply into human relationships and taps into the psyche of his country.

Six generations of the Sephardi Mani family are chronicled in this profound and passionate Mediterranean epic, which moves backwards from the 1980s to the mid-nineteenth century. The story comprises of five conversations, each centering on the fate of a different member of the Mani family, and in each the responses of one person are absent. Mr. Mani is surprisingly humorous, full of extraordinary historical perspectives, and deeply wise and compassionate. It is an imaginative tour-de-force.

In the autumn, Molkho's wife dies. His years of loving care have ended and his newfound freedom proves unlike the one he had imagined. It is uneasy, filled with the erotic fantasies of a man who must fall in love, but whose longing for meaningful relationships is held hostage by the spirit of his wife. Winter sees him in Berlin in a comic encounter with a legal adviser from his office in Haifa. Spring takes him to the Galilee and an impossible infatuation. Jerusalem in the summer brings another man's wife and an extraordinary request. And the following autumn there is Nina whose yearning for her Russian home brings Molkho back to life. 'In this finely observed and oddly moving comic novel?Yehoshua makes us feel [Molkho's] humanity - and deftly wins him our sympathy.' Kirkus

Sailing from the North African port of Tangier to a small, distant town called Paris are a Jewish merchant, Ben Attar, his two beloved wives and his Arab partner, Abu Lutfi. They have come for a meeting with their third partner the widower, Raphael Abulafia who has been forced to turn his back on their previous trading partnership because of his new wife's distrust of the dual marriage of Ben Attar. The latter turns this annual trading voyage into a personal quest to legitimise his second wife, restore his honour, and, equally important, to show others the richness and humanity in his way of life. A.B. Yehoshua has imaginatively recreated a medieval world (from North Africa to Paris, from Spain to Germany) with its merchant trade in great depth and sensuous detail. His evocation of one man's love is lyrical, erotic even.

Professor Yohanan Rivlin has two obsessions, the first and most ambitious, is to understand the Arab mind - no mean feat in itself though perhaps made easier by the fact that he lives and works with Israeli Arabs. The second - and more personal, though equally hard to grasp - is to understand the failure of his elder son's marriage. Rivlin's two quests lead him to extraordinary - and at times highly entertaining - encounters with very disparate people, where the personal becomes intertwined with the political, as he searches out the truth both in politics and life.

An experiment is under way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: a woman, recently widowed, is starting a trial period in assisted living, mainly to placate her over-anxious son, whilst in Jerusalem her daughter Noga, a young harpist, returns from her job with a Dutch orchestra to look after the family apartment. To enliven her stay, Noga's brother finds work for her - playing roles as an extra in film, TV, and in the opera Carmen. The random roles Noga is thrust into resonate strangely with her own life which she begins to re-evaluate. Central to her past is the fact that she refused to have children, resulting in the break-up of her marriage. No-one in her family understood her motives for not wanting children and everyone has a different explanation for it. Now, a chance encounter with her former husband reveals his continuing powerful, love as well as a shocking deed she committed during their marriage. But Noga is a free spirit neither tied to the past nor defined by it, and always keen to push boundaries. She lives for her music and is willing to go wherever it takes her. The three-month experiment proves as much of a test for her as for her mother and both are radically transformed by the end. A.B. Yehoshua is as creative, humorous and provocative as ever in The Extra, exploring themes familiar to him of love, family relationships and artistic ambitions, set mainly in an ever-changing Jerusalem.

A suicide bomb explodes in a Jerusalem market. One of the victims is a migrant worker without any papers, only a salary slip from the bakery where she worked as a night cleaner. As her body lies unclaimed in the morgue, her employers are labelled unfeeling and inhuman by a local journalist. The manager of human resources is given the task of discovering who she was and why she had come to Jerusalem. As the image of this once-beautiful dead woman begins to obsess him, the manager turns this duty into a personal mission - he is no longer just saving his company's reputation by trying to discover her identity and assure her of a dignified funeral. He is now restoring her not only to her family and country but also to common humanity - whilst at the same time conquering the hardness of his own heart. "There are human riches here. The manager moves from a man who has given up on love to one who opens himself to it. And there are strange and powerful scenes - of the morgue, of the coffin, of the Soviet base where the manager passes through the purging of body and soul." Carole Angier, The Independent

This paperback edition brings together novellas and short stories of the celebrated Jewish writer A.B. Yehoshua, including two stories previously unpublished in English. Mr Mani, which appeared in the previous hardback edition, is now a novel in its own right.

A husband seeks his wife's lover who is lost in the turbulence of Israel's Yom Kippur War. As the story of his quest unfolds and grows in intensity, the main protagonists are drawn into the search and are transformed by it: through the different perspectives of husband, wife, teenage daughter, and young Arab emerges a complex picture of the uneasy present, the tension between generations, between Israel's past and future, between Jews and Arabs.;'We see an Arab and an Israeli locked into a debate of proximity, alikeness, mental hatred, that Yehoshua's superb ability to render both presences relieves of all sentimentality. What I value most in The Lover is a gift for equidistance - between characters, even between the feelings on both sides.' Alfred Kazin, New York Review of Books

A "New York Times Book Review" Editors' Choice
Winner, 2012 Prix du Meilleur Livre etranger
"The greatest Hebrew novelist." -- "Jewish Review of Books"
An aging Israeli film director has been invited to the pilgrimage city of Santiago de Compostela for a retrospective of his work. When Yair Moses arrives, a painting over his bed triggers a distant memory from one of his early films: a scene that caused a rift with his brilliant but difficult screenwriter. Upon his return to Israel, Moses decides to travel to the south to look for his elusive former partner and propose a new collaboration. But the screenwriter demands a price for it that will have strange and lasting consequences.
A searching and original novel by one of the world's most esteemed writers, "The Retrospective" is a meditation on mortality and intimacy, on the limits of memory and the struggle of artistic creation.
" "The Retrospective"] moved me deeply." -- Vivian Gornick, "The Nation "
" Yehoshua] achieves an autumnal tone as he ruminates on memory's slippery hold on life and on art." --" The New Yorker"

A couple, long married, are spending an unaccustomed week apart. Ya'ari, an engineer, is busy juggling the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, his children, and his grandchildren. His wife, Daniela, flies from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of her older sister. There she confronts her anguished brother-in-law, Yirmiyahu, whose soldier son was killed six years earlier in the West Bank by "friendly fire." Yirmiyahu is now managing a team of African researchers digging for the bones of man's primate ancestors as he desperately strives to detach himself from every shred of his identity, Jewish and Israeli.
With great artistry, A. B. Yehoshua has once again written a rich, compassionate, rewarding novel in which sharply rendered details of modern Israeli life and age-old mysteries of human existence echo one another in complex and surprising ways.

A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of "gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee," the bakery's owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman's life take shape--she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful--he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love. At once profoundly serious and highly entertaining, A. B. Yehoshua astonishes us with his masterly, often unexpected turns in the story and with his ability to get under the skin and into the soul of Israel today.

In the autumn, Molkho's wife dies and his years of loving attention are ended. But his newfound freedom is filled with the erotic fantasies of a man who must fall in love. Winter sees him away to the operas of Berlin and a comic tryst with a legal advisor who has a sprained ankle. Spring takes him to Galilee and an underage Indian girl. Jerusalem in the summer presents him with an offer from an old classmate to seduce his infertile wife. And the next autumn it is Nina (if only they spoke the same language ), whose yearning for her Russian home leads Molkho back to life.
Five Seasons is a finely nuanced, unabashedly realistic novel that provides immense reading pleasure.

Yochanan Rivlin, a professor at Haifa University, is a man of boundless and often naive curiosity. His wife, Hagit, a district judge, is tolerant of almost everything but her husband's faults and prevarications. Frequent arguments aside, they are a well-adjusted couple with two grown sons.
When one of Rivlin's students-a young Arab bride from a village in the Galilee-is assigned to help with his research in recent Algerian history, a two-pronged mystery develops. As they probe the causes of the bloody Algerian civil war, Rivlin also becomes obsessed with his son's failed marriage.
Rivlin's search leads to a number of improbable escapades. In this comedy of manners, at once deeply serious and highly entertaining, Yehoshua brilliantly portrays characters from disparate sectors of Israeli life, united above all by a very human desire for, and fear of, the truth in politics and life.

In the year 999, when Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant, takes a second wife, he commits an act whose unforeseen consequences will forever alter his family, his relationships, his business-his life. In an attempt to forestall conflict and advance his business interests at the same time, Ben Attar undertakes his annual journey to Europe with both his first wife and his new wife. The trip is the beginning of a profound human drama whose moral conflicts of fidelity and desire resonate with those of our time. Yehoshua renders the medieval world of Jewish and Christian culture and trade with astonishing depth and sensuous detail. Through the trials of a medieval merchant, the renowned author explores the deepest questions about the nature of morality, character, codes of human conduct, and matters of the heart.

Yehoshua is one of Israel's most prominent novelists and a controversial theorist on politics, culture, history and Jewish identity. These interviews introduce him to an English-speaking audience and reveal the interplay of literary, psychological, mythological and political motifs in his work.

"Seductively heady . . . Ingeniously explores the unfathomable mysteries of the heart." --"Philadelphia Inquirer"
A young Israeli intern vying for the position of surgeon learns that his internship has been terminated and he has been chosen to accompany the hospital administrator and his wife on a trip to India. There, the couple intend to retrieve their ailing daughter and bring her back to Israel. The long journey awakens urges in the young doctor that will threaten his carefully contained world.
Juxtaposing Western realism and Eastern mysticism, Open Heart is an "astonishing work about love in all its forms. One that] speaks across the barriers of translation and culture to readers everywhere" ("Washington Post Book World").
"At times incantatory and magical, sometimes disturbing, and often astonishing . . . Entertains the mind while it captivates the soul." --"Seattle Times"
"Mind-expanding and poetic, a book that will stay with you long after you have turned its final page." --"New York Times"