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In Falling Out of Time, David Grossman has created a genre-defying drama - part play, part prose, pure poetry - to tell the story of bereaved parents setting out to reach their lost children. It begins in a small village, in a kitchen, where a man announces to his wife that he is leaving, embarking on a journey in search of their dead son.The man - called simply the 'Walking Man' - paces in ever-widening circles around the town. One after another, all manner of townsfolk fall into step with him (the Net Mender, the Midwife, the Elderly Maths Teacher, even the Duke), each enduring his or her own loss. The walkers raise questions of grief and bereavement: Can death be overcome by an intensity of speech or memory? Is it possible, even for a fleeting moment, to call to the dead and free them from their death? Grossman's answer to such questions is a hymn to these characters, who ultimately find solace and hope in their communal act of breaching death’s hermetic separateness. For the reader, the solace is in their clamorous vitality, and in the gift of Grossman’s storytelling – a realm where loss is not merely an absence, but a life force of its own.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 27. JAN. 2014

Although it's identified as a novel, this searing narrative from Israeli writer Grossman is not cast in traditional form. A mixture of free-verse, prose, and stage directions, it's a searching cri de coeur an impassioned exploration of existential questions about life and death. In Grossman's previous novel, To the End of the Land, a son is lost in battle; while Grossman was writing that book, his own son was killed in Israel's 2006 war with Lebanon. Here, a bereaved father, who, after five years, still cannot come to terms with his son's death, leaves his wife and home to try to find the "there," where the boy's soul resides. As he relentlessly walks through and around his village, the Walking Man is joined by others who have lost their children. His voice intense, anguished, almost deranged by grief is mediated by the Town Chronicler, who also introduces the voices of the other seekers the net mender, the midwife, the duke, the cobbler, the math teacher, the centaur who join the Walking Man. In hoping to be granted even a moment of communication with the dead, the Walking Man laments "the vast expanse his death/ created in me," and his need to embrace "this/ lonely/ dead/ child." This piercingly sad elegy culminates in a moment of peace in which the community of the bereaved contemplates the cycle of life and death. The precision and sensory depth of Grossman's language renders this unconventional work an unforgettable and magnificent document of suffering.

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