CHOSEN AS BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE OBSERVER, NEW YORKER, NEW YORK TIMES BOOKS REVIEW, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT AND THE TIMES
'Lucid and exhilarating . A great gift' New York Review of Books
'Tantalizes and compels ... A welcome reminder of how a novel can be defiantly and brilliantly novel' Douglas Kennedy, New Statesman
Jules Epstein has vanished: first slowly, then all at once. He begins divesting himself of all of his worldly possessions. Now he's fallen off the face of the earth, and all the search parties can find is his empty monogrammed briefcase, abandoned in the Judean foothills.
In her room at the Tel Aviv Hilton, an American novelist has also left home to undergo a transformation. But when a stranger recruits her for a project involving Kafka, she is drawn into a mystery that will take her on a metaphysical journey and change her in ways she could never have imagined.
Jules Epstein has vanished from the world, last seen in the Judean foothills. How a man of his vigour could disappear is an enigma.
Over a year earlier, following the death of his parents, Epstein began his transformation, shedding the possessions he had spent a lifetime accumulating - a watch here, an Old Master there - before travelling from New York to Tel Aviv and checking into the Hilton, intending to do something to commemorate his mother and father.
Meanwhile, a novelist leaves her husband and children behind in Brooklyn and arrives at the same hotel, hoping that the view of the pool she used to dive into as a child will unlock her writer's block. But when a retired professor recruits her for an intriguing project involving Kafka, she is drawn into a mystery that will change her in unimaginable ways.
Intelligent, witty and . always compelling
