Author

Amos Oz

Amos Oz
  • One of Amos Oz’s earliest and most famous novels, My Michael was 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, My Michael is 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 on 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 a place.

  • Strange things are happening in Tel Ilan, a century-old pioneer village. A disgruntled retired politician complains to his daughter that he hears the sound of digging at night. Could it be their tenant, that young Arab? But then the young Arab hears the digging sounds too. Where has the mayor’s wife gone, vanished without a trace, her note saying “Don’t worry about me”?

    Around the village, the veneer of new wealth—gourmet restaurants, art galleries, a winery—barely conceals the scars of war and of past generations: disused air raid shelters, rusting farm tools, and trucks left wherever they stopped.

    Scenes from Village Life is a memorable novel-in-stories by the inimitable Amos Oz: a brilliant, unsettling glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life.

  • The Same Sea is Amos Oz’s most adventurous and inventive book, a novel of lyrical beauty and narrative power and the book by which he would like to be remembered. We meet the middle-aged Albert; his wife, whom he has lost to cancer; his prodigal son, who wanders the mountains of Tibet hoping to find himself; and his son’s enticing young girlfriend, with whom Albert becomes infatuated and who in turn sleeps with her boyfriend’s close friend.

    In this human profusion is a fever dream of chaos and order, love and eroticism, loyalty and betrayal, and ultimately an extraordinary energy.

  • Winner of the International Literature Prize, the new novel by Amos Oz is his first full-length work since the bestselling A Tale of Love and Darkness.

    Jerusalem, 1959. Shmuel Ash, a biblical scholar, is adrift in his young life when he finds work as a caregiver for a brilliant but cantankerous old man named Gershom Wald. There is, however, a third, mysterious presence in his new home. Atalia Abravanel, the daughter of a deceased Zionist leader, a beautiful woman in her forties, entrances young Shmuel even as she keeps him at a distance. Piece by piece, the old Jerusalem stone house, haunted by tragic history and now home to the three misfits and their intricate relationship, reveals its secrets.

    At once an exquisite love story and coming-of-age novel, an allegory for the state of Israel and for the biblical tale from which it draws its title, Judas is Amos Oz’s most powerful novel in decades.

  • Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this extraordinary memoir is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history.

    It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was twelve and a half years old, his mother committed suicide—a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz, changes his name, marries, has children, and finally becomes a writer as well as an active participant in the political life of Israel.

    A story of clashing cultures and lives, of suffering and perseverance, of love and darkness.