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; France: Seuil; Germany: Hanser;  Hungary: Scolar; Italy: Mondadori; Netherlands: Cossee;  Romania: Polirom; Spain (Catalan): Grup 62; Spain (Spanish): Penguin Random House; Sweden: Bonniers

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

“In his new book, WORDS, WHERE ARE YOU?, Grossman dares to return to the freedom and eccentricity that marked his early work. The book is first and foremost a formal and linguistic achievement. The writing is virtuosic, yet at no point does it feel like an end in itself. It reads instead as the product of a language that has slipped its reins in order to tell a tangible story, rich in meticulously rendered detail. The strongest moments in Grossman’s work are precisely those where his characters do not fully know who they are. In those silent, unsettled places, he found words. And in WORDS, WHERE ARE YOU?, he found them indeed.” —Haaretz

“In his spectacular and moving new book WORDS, WHERE ARE YOU?, David Grossman returns to issues that preoccupied him in the past: the tension between the body and the mind, between the desire to grow and the desire to remain a child, between the need to use words to describe and reflect experiences, and the limitations of words, suppressed sexual desires, the gap between bourgeois life and adventures and crimes and crooks, and much more. WORDS, WHERE ARE YOU? is Grossman’s most courageous book.” —Maariv

“We are being invited into one of the most exposed, unguarded texts Grossman has ever written – into that place few writers dare to go, where no one knows where the words are, and all that remains is stammering, pain, and a willingness to stand exposed and reveal the seams: the scaffolding of humiliation and pain on which, in the end, all literature rests.” —Panas

“WORDS, WHERE ARE YOU? presents a surprising new world, a huge range of colors and emotions – and a lot of passion. Grossman at his best. In Grossman’s world, it is almost impossible to survive and exist without the protective suit of books and words, and therefore the title of the book, WORDS, WHERE ARE YOU?, first of all, arouses great anxiety that does not really subside even in the last pages of the book. Any criticism stifles and shrinks such beautiful moments in the book, and will probably never succeed in expressing the full spectrum of colors and emotions it offers. A must-read.” —Walla

“WORDS, WHERE ARE YOU? is a crossroads in Grossman’s great literary project: over and over again, it examines how a person becomes an individual within a family, language, body, and history that precedes him; how imagination and words protect him from the forces that seek to define, swallow, or erase him; and how fear, desire, and secret lead to self-discovery. Readers do not observe this journey from the outside, but rather discover the character in the process. For Grossman, literature reaches the soul before psychology can name it, and it gives shape to what precedes the explanation – the fear of yourself and your body, of your desires when they are directed to the place they should not be directed, and of the horror that a hidden thought or wish will suddenly become reality.” —Israel HaYom

“WORDS, WHERE ARE YOU? is a dive into deep, dark waters. The novel continues the penetrating gaze from BE MY KNIFE and the adolescent fragment from THE BOOK OF INTIMATE GRAMMAR, but less tight than them, and far from the spirit of compassion and salvation of Grossman’s later books, such as MORE THAN I LOVE MY LIFE. There is no escapism or easy consolation here; it is a work that demands the reader to agree to be wounded along with its protagonists.” —Makor Rishon