LESHEM, Ron << back to list Ron Leshem, born in 1976, is a native of Ramat Gan. His novel BEAUFORT won the Sapir Prize – Israel’s top literary award – for 2006, as well as the Yitzhak Sadeh Prize for military literature. (photo © Eldad Rafaeli) Web site http://www.ronleshem.com/ Bibliography & Foreign sales NILOOFAR (fiction) 2009 Best seller since publication September 2009 This intoxicating coming of age tale revolves around Kami, a young man who abandons the port city of his youth for the bright lights of Teheran, where he falls in love with a daring and beautiful race car driver. Their love leads him to underground parties in the metropolis, to forbidden drugs, music and desire. In the strange building owned by his aunt, an actress whose star has dimmed, he befriends a tough and elderly disgraced judge, a blood-thirsty cat and a shy homosexual with a dangerous yen for men in uniform. When Kami acquires a computer, the fragile balance in the building shifts out of control. The horizons of the Internet beckon to each of the reclusive tenants, with the allure of the freedom that they are denied outside, where the names of the streets are constantly being changed and the walls bear down with pronouncements of the Fathers of the Revolution. From the black market, where you can buy everything that is forbidden, to the public squares where adulterous women are executed; from the towering skyscrapers to the villages hidden from sight; between euphoria and paranoia, a portrait of modern Iran is exposed, rife with contradictions, where the horror is addictive but the taste of freedom is immeasurably more so. A place more distant than the moon, yet with a magnetism that controls the ebb and flow of the heart. Niloofar is a bold and surprising creation that dares to sail the imagination beyond the black veil and return with enchanting characters, richly-laden images, beauty and pain. It is a reflection from there that illuminates us equally over here. This is a literary achievement of striking color and expression, and it transports the reader into a totally different and fabulously credible reality. Rights sold to: Israel: Kinneret Zmora Bitan Reviews “[Choosing to write about Iran] proves that Leshem is interested in crossing the border, offering the local literary imagination an unfamiliar territory” “The reading experience fulfils the political role of meaningful literature: to provide expressions through which the readers can experience the plot for themselves, to adopt unfamiliar—sometimes forbidden and dangerous—points of view, and to expand the boundaries of the imagination through them.” Ha’aretz “A glimpse into an unfamiliar world, an engaging plot which brings to mind The Kite Runner…superb.” YNET In this flowing, riveting, and wonderful book Leshem proves that he is one of the greatest literary voices to have emerged in Israel in recent years. Beautiful! Once again Leshem demonstrates that he knows how to tell a story of a faraway place, in this case the Islamic Republic of Iran and still make the reader feel as though he was born, raised, and educated there.” MAKOR RISHON BEAUFORT (Fiction) Beaufort, a beautiful and deadly crusader fort in southern Lebanon, is a world of its own, an enclave in the heart of enemy territory where Israeli soldier-boys create a state with its own rules and its own unique, colorful, brutal language. With a critical eye and an empathetic heart, author Ron Leshem dishes up a wholly human story that takes place in conditions that are anything but. Fast-paced and brutally honest, unflinching and uproariously funny, BEAUFORT has been hailed – not only by critics but by the generation of soldiers who served in Lebanon during Israeli occupation – as the true voice of that sobering period. Written as the diary of Liraz (Erez) Liberti, the head of a commando team stationed at Beaufort during the last winter of Israeli occupation, BEAUFORT is a revolutionary and potent look at the triviality of war and death, and the courage it takes to put an end to it. This is not a story of war, but of retreat. This is a story with no enemy, only an amorphous entity that drops bombs from the skies. And while thirteen young men propel the novel and give it life and color, the real hero of BEAUFORT is fear: contagious, intoxicating, palpable fear, a word they forbid themselves from uttering. BEAUFORT is Ron Leshem’s first book. Joseph Cedar (“Time of Favor,” ”Campfire”), is the recipient of the Silver Bear for his direction of the film version of BEAUFORT at the Berlin Film Festival 2007 and was short listed for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Rights sold to: USA, Bantam Books; Audio: Tantor Media, Inc; UK, Harvill and Secker; Germany, Rowohlt Verlag; France, Editions du Seuil; Italy, Rizzoli; Holland, Meulenhoff; Poland, WAB; Portugal, Bico de Pena; Romania, SC Leda; Korea, Dulnyouk Publishing; China, ThinKingdom Media Group Ltd.,Brazil, Record Publishing; Israel (Russian), Kinneret Zmora Bitan; Israel, Kinneret Zmora Bitan Film rights: Joseph Cedar Reviews “Ron Leshem has succeeded in creating an entire world, simply through language.” -author David Grossman, quoted in Yediot Ahronot ”Though Israel boasts a rich and vibrant literary culture and has been almost continuously at war since its founding, none of its writers -- many of them veterans -- have heretofore produced a defining novel of men in combat. Ron Leshem’s evocative, heartbreaking and haunting first novel, ”Beaufort,” makes history of that anomaly… ”Beaufort” is that rare thing, a novel of deep moral concern in which sympathetically drawn and beautifully realized characters are allowed to speak for themselves… It’s also a compelling window on contemporary young Israel… Leshem’s novel captures all the pathosalsong with the claustrophobia of an isolated outpost, the casual heroism, the pervasiveness of fear.” Los Angeles Times ”Reading the novel now, as Israel is under pressure to go back into Gaza, one is reminded how easily an army can find itself trapped in enemy territory, sunk, as one general puts it to Liraz, “deep in tactics, without strategies.” New York Times Sunday Book Review ”By turns, it is tragic, funny, mordant, irate, shocking, and poignant. Beaufort won the 2006 Sapir Award, Israel’s top literary prize, and has also been made into a film, but it will be new to most U.S. readers. A must-read.” Starred review Booklist ”The novel brings to life the situation of very young men on a dangerous mission. This is a picture of war from a soldier’s point of view. Its language is crude, the body count rises, and yet the tenderness of the bonds among the men is extraordinary. As they begin to have doubts about their mission and their government begins to seem cynical about the situation in southern Lebanon, the novel also becomes an indictment of war irrevocably altering the futures of idealistic young men. Leshem brings these issues to life. An important novel, recommended for all collections.” Starred review Library Journal “Ron Leshem’s powerful first novel tells the story of the last agonising months through the eyes of the final commando unit stationed there…Flamboyant yet gripping, the novel comes to a thrilling climax with the soldiers’ perilous evacuation from Beaufort… Leshem brings us some sobering news, revealing how war is addictive as well as appalling, and how its terrible intensity can make ordinary life seem dull. As even crass Erez comes to realise, ”I’m not really here to protect the northern residents of Israel but because I have this urge to kill.” The Independent UK ”Beaufort: a title full of tenderness, romance and charm but misleading. Far from being pastoral, the book is one of those texts that take you by surprise…droll and harrowing, the author captures, through the squad of young soldiers, the singularities which make up the wealth and complexity of Israeli society.” Le Monde ”In pungent and rhythmic writing, Leshem depicts a society which feels morally as well as physically besieged.” Le Figaro ”a radical anti-war novel; a universal reflection about fear and defeat... The novel has a documentary power which is difficult to evade... It is not a war novel but a novel about retreat and a petition for the message that defeat can be much more strengthening than any victory bought with blood.” Der Spiegel ”Ron Leshem’s Beaufort is literature that gets under your skin… Leshem’s style leaves no choice but to dive into the lives of the soldiers at Beaufort and suffer with them in order to know, ultimately, that war is neither heroic nor good but an experience whose intensity borders on inhumanity.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung “BEAUFORT is a fascinating work of originality that contains the foundations for understanding the contemporary Israeli male army myth.” -Haim Finkelman, Ha’aretz