Take Up and Read
A Novel
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
"In Shimon Adaf's Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured." —Lavie Tidhar, author of By Force Alone
In the summer of 2014, at the height of the Gaza-Israel conflict, Elish Ben-Zaken met the poet and librarian Nahum Farkash in the border town of Sderot. They spoke only briefly, but in that brief encounter, Elish might have missed the key to unraveling the case of a Sderot woman who disappeared for two days, only to reappear with no memory of her time away.
In Take Up and Read, Shimon Adaf returns to Farkash’s story. Attempting to defend the legacy of the singer Dalia Shoshan—whose murder Elish investigated several years before—Farkash tries to impede the production of a new documentary about her life. Meanwhile, he reminisces about his past, reflecting on his experiences as a young religious boy growing up in Sderot.
Fourteen years later, in a militant Israel that has been distorted by catastrophic war, Elish’s niece and nephew are haunted by their uncle’s death and the failure of his 2014 investigation. As Tahel and Oshri conduct experiments in search of the truth, they draw near to the heart of a great conspiracy.
In this masterful conclusion to the Lost Detective Trilogy, Shimon Adaf brings together futuristic biotechnology, parallel universes, and Jewish mysticism. Take Up and Read addresses a central concern of the trilogy, interrogating humankind’s tenuous grasp on the boundaries of our selves, and the arbitrary connections between the body, consciousness, and perception.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Adaf (The Detective's Complaint) concludes his epic Lost Detective Trilogy with an extraordinary blend of science fiction, crime, and high fantasy. Elish Ben Zaken, a retired private detective, is dead from an apparent suicide, and his niece Tahel and nephew Oshri pick up the loose ends from Elish's pending cases. They seek out Nahum Farkash for help, a 30-something poet and librarian who, like Elish, grew up in the Israeli Moroccan Jewish community. Nahum accepts, though he has his hands full with protecting the legacy of singer-songwriter Dalia Shushan—with whom he had a tryst when they were teens, and whose long-ago murder was solved by Elish—from an exploitative documentary film production. Meanwhile, his library considers adopting a literacy program titled "Take Up and Read," conceived by corporate tool Therese Kavillio to mine data from readers. But there is more to Therese than meets the eye, and it seems no coincidence that the program's title phrase shows up in a song Dalia wrote and recorded for Nahum that he kept hidden on his phone. The story jumps ahead in time to a bleak dystopian future in which Israeli and Palestinian societies have each been reshaped by a catastrophic war. As with the previous installments, Adaf's rich characterizations are complemented by the clever prose. The result is an instant classic.
