Amos Oz – författare

Discover Amos Oz’s most iconic work in this extraordinary memoir that is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation*OVER 2 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE*‘A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant’ Simon SchamaAmos Oz's remarkable, moving story takes us on a seductive journey through his childhood and adolescence, along Jerusalem's war-torn streets in the 1940s and '50s and into a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. Caught between them is one small boy with the weight of generations on his shoulders. Oz dives into 120 years of family history and paradox, the saga of a Jewish love-hate affair with Europe that sweeps from Vilna and Odessa, via Poland and Prague, to Israel. Farce and heartbreak, history and humanity make up this story of clashing cultures and lives, of suffering and perseverance, of love and darkness.‘Oz’s greatest work…not only his autobiography, but in a way the biography of Israel before it was created’ David Grossman, Observer

'Evocative and penetrating. Oz handles his narrative with great agility’ Sunday TimesOne day a man may just pick up and walk out. What he leaves behind stays behind. What's left behind has nothing to stare at but his backIn the winter of 1965, Yonaton Lifshitz decided to leave the kibbutz on which he was born, and his sterile marriage, to start a new life. But as he engineers his escape, the arrival of Azariah Gitlin, a keen new recruit, brings about a painful reconciliation of their different destinies in a society struggling with changing realities.

An unnamed author waits in a bar in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night. He is there to give a reading of his work but as he sits, bored, he begins to conjure up the life stories of the people he meets. Later, when the reading is done he asks a woman for a drink. She declines and the author walks away, only to climb the steps to her flat, later that night. Or does he? In Amos Oz's beguiling, intriguing story the reader never really knows where reality ends and invention begins...

A teenage son shoots himself under his parents' bed. They sleep that night unaware he is lying dead beneath them.A stranger turns up at a man's door to persude him that they must get rid of his ageing mother in order to sell the house.An old man grumbles to his daughter about the unexplained digging and banging he hears under the house at night. As each story unfolds, Amos Oz, builds a portrait of a village in Israel. It is a surreal and unsettling place. Each villager is searching for something, and behind each episode is another, hidden story. In this powerful, hynotic work Amos Oz peers into the darkness of our lives and gives us a glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday existence.By the winner of the 2013 Franz Kafka Prize, previous winners of which include Philip Roth, Ivan Klima, Elfriede Jelinek, Harold Pinter and John Banville.

‘A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant’ Simon SchamaAmos Oz, the internationally acclaimed author of A Tale of Love and Darkness and Judas, grew up in war-torn Jerusalem, where as a boy he witnessed first-hand the poisonous consequences of fanaticism.In How To Cure a Fanatic Amos Oz analyses the historical roots of violence and confronts truths about the extremism nurtured throughout society. By bringing us face to face with fanaticism he suggests ways in which we can all respond.From the author of A Tale of Love and Darkness and Man Booker International Prize shortlisted Judas.‘He was the conscience of Israel’ Roger Cohen, New York Times

Eight interlinked family dramas set on an Israeli kibbutz from the masterful storyteller behind A Tale of Love and Darkness‘On the kibbutz it’s hard to know. We’re all supposed to be friends but very few really are’Ariella, unhappy in love, confides in the woman whose husband she stole.Nahum, a devoted father, can’t find the words to challenge his daughter’s promiscuous lover.The old idealists deplore the apathy of the young, while the young are so used to kibbutz life that they can’t work out if they’re impassioned or indifferent. In this short story collection Amos Oz reveals the secrets and frustrations of the human heart‘Lucid and heartbreaking’ Guardian

The Hill of Evil Counsel is a fusion of history and imaginative narrative, re-creating the twilight world of Jerusalem during the fading days of the British Mandate. In these three closely linked stories, Oz vividly evokes the stifling atmosphere of impending crisis as real personalities rub shoulders with fictional characters whose hopes and fears are hauntingly portrayed.

‘One of the greatest prose writers in contemporary fiction’ The TimesIn the last years of British rule in Jerusalem, a lonely, bookish Israeli boy befriends a British soldier in this tale of friendship in the face of enmity.Jerusalem 1947. British soldiers patrol the streets, and bullets and bombs are a nightly occurrence. Caught up in the fervour and unrest against the occupying forces,12-year old Proffy dreams of being an underground fighter. But some of his dreams are less heroic. Temptation lurks everywhere for the youth who wants to be a man – and betrayal not far behind.

‘A writer of revelatory genius’ GuardianFollowing the bizarre accidental death of his wife, Israeli secret service agent Yoel Ravid retires to the suburbs with his daughter, mother and mother-in-law. After a lifetime of uncovering other people's secrets he is forced to look back at the lies he has told himself; at the desolate enigma of his wife's life and death; his years of service to the state and the riddle of his daughter's behaviour.‘Humorous, melancholy and touching’ New York Times

Where the Jackals Howl is prize-winning author Amos Oz's first collection of stories. On publication it received immediate critical acclaim and revealed Oz to be a master craftsman probing the emotional depths of his characters. The lives of ordinary Israelis are set against the backdrop of community life in a Kibbutz. The fate of these individuals, their drives, ambitions and idiosyncrasies, are grounded by the physical and social structure of their community as Oz portrays their world as a microcosm of the wider world.

A celebrated novelist and an acclaimed historian of ideas, father and daughter, unravel the chain of words at the core of Jewish life, history, and cultureWhy are words so important to so many Jews? Novelist Amos Oz and historian Fania Oz-Salzberger roam the gamut of Jewish history to explain the integral relationship of Jews and words. Through a blend of storytelling and scholarship, conversation and argument, father and daughter tell the tales behind Judaism’s most enduring names, adages, disputes, texts, and quips. These words, they argue, compose the chain connecting Abraham with the Jews of every subsequent generation.Framing the discussion within such topics as continuity, women, timelessness, and individualism, Oz and Oz-Salzberger deftly engage Jewish personalities across the ages, from the unnamed, possibly female author of the Song of Songs through obscure Talmudists to contemporary writers. They suggest that Jewish continuity, even Jewish uniqueness, depends not on central places, monuments, heroic personalities, or rituals but rather on written words and an ongoing debate between the generations. Full of learning, lyricism, and humor, Jews and Words offers an extraordinary tour of the words at the heart of Jewish culture and extends a hand to the reader, any reader, to join the conversation.

An urgent and deeply necessary work, Dear Zealots offers three powerful essays that speak directly to our present age, on the rise of zealotry in Israel and around the world.

This collection - published here in English for the first time - brings together a number of political, personal and literary pieces by Israel's most celebrated novelist and littérateur. Topics covered include: an examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a dispute between 'right and right'; reflections on the character of Zionism, on the concept of 'homeland', and on the nature of the kibbutz; the meaning of socialism in the Israeli context; and portraits of several Jewish writers and thinkers whose ideas and themes in one way or another have proved influential or determinative for Amos Oz himself. These essays, which put a unique perspective on the author's own experiences and development, reveal a complex and humane figure of practical political influence as well as of significant literary stature. They will win for Oz new readers, while delighting those who will recognise here the qualities evident in his other writings.