From one of the world’s greatest modern writers comes a short but decades-long novel of a mother-father-son triangle. From childhood, Yaron Ashkenazi has kept notebooks, studying his father, Chaim Yosef, and his mother, Ahuva. His father, later called “a chameleon disguised as a human being” is “inextricably entangled in the mother’s bright soul.” Yaron writes of himself as "a kaleidoscope child, made of shards of imagination and lies and fragments of reality."

A bank clerk thought to be honest and dedicated to his work, and devoted to his wife and child, Chaim is found to be running a complex international fraud scheme. When he is arrested and put on trial, mother and son endure the ordeal of hearing the testimony of his ruined victims who trusted him. As he is led away to begin a 16 year prison sentence, he cries out to Yaron, "Forget me. I never existed!" His mother asks herself, "What do you call the life I thought I was living?"

The book then becomes Yaron’s narration of the complex past, which includes both sexual discovery and being discovered, and the years after the rupture. With resonance and homage to Agnon, Mann and Kafka, WORDS, WHERE ARE YOU? is intimate and intense. Grossman at his finest.

Rights Sold:

Brazil: Companhia das Letras; Croatia: Fraktura; Czech Republic: Euromedia; Germany: Hanser; Hungary: Scolar; Italy: Mondadori; Netherlands: Cossee;  Romania: Polirom; Spain (Catalan): Grup 62; Spain (Spanish): Penguin Random House

Praise:

“In an intimate, intense, and dark novella, David Grossman, one of the great writers in Hebrew, returns to the secrets and upheavals that occur within the family. What do we really know about the people we love? It’s not only the density of the human capsule built within the story that creates its richness. Among other things, it becomes a sounding board for other works of art, by Grossman and others.” —Yedioth Ahronoth