Love Life

Israel's provocative #1 bestseller from the author of Pain. In "a hybrid–Last Tango in Paris meets Story of O . . . Shalev deconstructs sexual longing" (Darcey Steinke, author of Flash Count Diary).

Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as a novel that "broke all the barriers . . . sexually explicit yet dense with biblical allusions and psychological insight," Love Life unbuttoned Hebrew literature and spent four months as Israel's number one bestseller.


What begins as a story of a young married woman's turbulent affair with an older man rapidly devolves into a feverish, lyrical crash course in the anatomy of obsession. When Yaara meets Aryeh, her father's boyhood friend, she is instantly drawn to his impassive and archly assured presence. It is not long before she forsakes her devoted and well-meaning husband for the powerful, mysterious older man who seems to embody all that she lacks: will, strength, and the key to her parents' inaccessible pasts. They embark on a heated affair that soon spirals toward the destructive as Yaara finds that the things in Aryeh that attract her also repel her with equal intensity.


With shocking immediacy, Shalev lays bare Yaara's struggle to navigate extreme terrain ranging from the sublime to the grotesque, the sacred to the profane, the liberating to the all-consuming. Love Life is cerebral, seductive, provocative, and profound.


"Shalev . . . outdoes Erica Jong with outrageously sensuous, often humiliating situations described by a narrator who acts as if she has lost her sanity while commenting wryly, even perceptively, on her own misdeeds."—Publishers Weekly

"Love Life is a lucid feverish dream . . . disturbingly brilliant."—Tubantia (Holland)