To the End of the Land

Ora, a middle-aged mother, is on the verge of celebrating her son Ofer's release from Israeli army service when he returns to the front for a major offensive. In a fit of preemptive grief and magical thinking, she sets out for a hike in the Galilee, leaving no forwarding information for the 'notifiers' who might darken her door with the worst possible news. Recently estranged from her husband Ilan, she drags along an unlikely companion: their former best friend and her former lover Avram, once a brilliant artistic spirit. Avram served in the army alongside Ilan when they were young, but their lives were forever changed one weekend when the two jokingly had Ora draw lots to see which of them would get the few days' leave being offered by their commander - a chance act that sent Avram into Egypt and the Yom Kippur War, where he was brutally tortured as a POW. In the aftermath, a virtual hermit, he refused to keep in touch with the family and has never met the boy. Now, as Ora and Avram sleep out in the hills, ford rivers and cross valleys, avoiding all news from the front, she gives him the gift of Ofer, word by word; she supplies the whole story of her motherhood, a retelling that keeps Ofer very much alive for Ora and for the reader, and opens Avram to human bonds undreamed of in his broken world. Grossman's rich imagining of a family in love and crisis makes for one of the great antiwar novels of our time.

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David Grossman was born in Jerusalem on January 25, 1954 and studied philosophy and theatre atthe Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is one of the leading Israeli writers of his generation, and the author of numerous pieces of fiction, nonfiction and children's literature. His work has been translated into 25 languages around the world.

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