“Preying”, the first novella, is a story driven by jealousy. Shaul, a successful academic, has been married for 25 years to Elisheva. For a decade, Shaul has been totally obsessed with the affair his wife is having with Paul. Not only is Shaul besotted by sexual fantasies of his wife with Paul, he actually facilitates their relationship.

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In the second novella, from which the book takes its title, Nili, the protagonist, is lying on her deathbed, terminally ill with cancer. Her daughter Rotem, who has found love and a relationship with another woman, returns to Israel to see her mother again for the last time before her death and reads her the story she has written, revolving around Nili’s relations, eighteen years earlier.

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​Rights Sold:

Brazil, Companhia das Letras;  China, Zhejiang Literature & Art; France, Editions du Seuil; Germany, Hanser Verlag; Greece, Kastaniotis; Holland, Cossee; Israel, HaKibbutz HaMeuhad; Italy, Mondadori; Russia: Text; Serbia, Arhipelag; Spain, Lumen; Sweden, Bonnier; UK, Bloomsbury; USA, Farrar, Straus & Giroux 

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Reviews:

“Startling, immediate and richly true. Grossman’s description is bristling with physical detail. His sentences are dizzying and intoxicating.” – New York Times

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“Absolutely magnificent … Grossman speaks with warmth of someone for whom persuasion is not only a means of seduction but an absolute necessity. By using an extraordinarily sensual and inventive prose, Grossman literally explores the inner life of his protagonists. Like a midwife that pulls the child from its mother’s womb, he extirpates the sorrows and grudges of his characters. Through his writings he gives a soul to the body and a body to the soul.” – Le Monde des Livres

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“A brilliant variation on an eternal human motive…” – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung