WHEN HEROES FLY

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Amir Gutfreund

Fiction, 2008

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Five boys and one girl grow up in a crowded and noisy working-class apartment block in the northern Israeli city of Haifa. History, for the most part, occurs outside the neighborhood. But its echoes sometimes intrude, and they have a powerful effect on the residents. The book begins shortly after the Six-Day War of 1967 and concludes almost three decades later in a suburb of Chicago, where the five boys –now grown men whose lives have taken them on different paths – reunite to rescue the girl from a religious cult.

 

Heroes Fly to Her is the melancholic yet humorous story of a beloved woman, a beloved city, and a beloved country. The characters’ formative events unfold against a backdrop of the colorful, eventful, controversial and slightly mad history of Israel. Above all, this is a novel about love – about what turns it on and turns it off, about loving people you know better than you know yourself, people whose lives are intertwined with yours in ways you may never understand.

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Rights Sold:

France: Gallimard; Israel: Kinneret, Zmora Bitan; Italy: Neri Pozza; US: Toby Press

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Reviews:

“Heroes Fly to Her is a once in a lifetime novel like [Amos Oz's] A Tale of Love and Darkness…” – Amichai Shalev, Ynet

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“[This is] a fun, entertaining, moving and compelling novel… [I]ts humor is incomparably subtle, the irony towards Israeli experience and towards the protagonists is the finest there is.” – Zur Ehrlich, Makor Rishon

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“Heroes Fly to Her refuses to compress history into prefabricated boxes, into preconceptions, into the conventions of good and bad, of was and was not. In fact it strongly refuses, almost violently, to recognize the general history, choosing instead a private, local and original history.”

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“Certainly, the major events from the beginning of Israeli occupation to Rabin's assassination breach through to the personal stories; they are there throughout the novel… but we must listen to the manner in which the text utilizes these events, as mere milestones, as temporal signposts.” – Time Out

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“It is a charming book, a novel that make you want to read on, which makes you miss its heroes. Towards the end it suddenly escalates, picking up the pace with which the plot unfolds, and you find yourself reading slower, not wanting the book to end, taking longer breaks, knowing that farewell is fast approaching”. – Sigal Riva, Mako

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