World Shadow

A fast-paced novel about politics, money, power and corruption that holds a mirror up to the present day.

It’s the mid-1990s. Gavriel Mansour wants to take advantage of the business opportunities opening up in Israel. Moving in political and financial circles, he finds his way into the upper reaches of power—but the higher he goes, the less he understands the intrigues in which he is involved.

Cut to the present. A group of young Londoners—homeless, unemployed and disaffected—is organising a worldwide strike to protest globalisation and inequality. Sick of being screwed over, they conspire to overturn the prevailing order.

Meanwhile, an eerily familiar American political consulting firm, with interests everywhere from Bolivia to the Congo, ostensibly exists to further liberal and progressive causes—until the veil is drawn back on the true nature of its activities.

With its masterly interwoven narrative strands and its global perspective, World Shadow confirms Nir Baram as a major contemporary writer on the world stage.

Nir Baram was born into a political family in Jerusalem in 1976. His grandfather and father were both ministers in Israeli Labor Party governments. He has worked as a journalist and an editor, and as an advocate for equal rights for Palestinians. Baram began publishing fiction when he was twenty-two, and is the author of five novels. His books have been translated into more than ten languages and have received critical acclaim around the world. He has been shortlisted several times for the Sapir Prize and in 2010 he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Hebrew Literature.

Jessica Cohen is a British-Israeli-American translator. She shared the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for translating David Grossman’s 2014 novel A Horse Walks into a Bar, and is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow.

‘The best novel Baram has written so far, a brilliant literary achievement. World Shadow is asking the most important questions of our time.’ Israel Today

‘The most intelligent, insightful and thought-provoking documentation written to date of the economic, social, moral and cultural processes that are sending seismic waves throughout our world.’ Shelly Yachimovich