The Lawgiver
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
96-year-old author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Caine Mutinypens an ingeniously witty novel about the life of Moses
For more than 50 years, Herman Wouk has dreamed of writing a novel about the life of Moses Finally, at the age of 96, he has found an ingeniously witty way to tell the tale of The Lawgiver, a romantic and suspenseful epistolary novel about a group of people trying to make a movie about Moses in the present day.
At its centre is Margo Solovei, a brilliant young writer-director who has rejected her father's strict Jewish upbringing to pursue a career in the arts. When an Australian multi-billionaire promises to finance a movie about Moses, Margo does everything she can to land the job, including a reunion with her estranged first love, an influential lawyer with whom she has unfinished business.
* Visit Herman Wouk's website at www.hermanwouk.net
'Endearing and light-hearted' Michael Prodger, FT
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Moses, star of the Hebrew Bible; major figure in the New Testament and the Qur'an; played on screen by Charlton Heston, Burt Lancaster, and Val Kilmer; now the inspiration for both Wouk's novel and the big-budget movie production it chronicles. At 97, Wouk has created a tale that, for all its modern trappings (it's told in e-mails, faxes, and transcripts, and relies on the movements of the very rich and the very Hollywood), is essentially old-fashioned. This is not a bad thing: after an exposition-heavy start that sets up an Australian billionaire intent on financing a film about the Lawgiver, various screenwriters, producers, actors, lawyers, and even scientists with various agendas; Hollywood wunderkind and lapsed Jew Margo Solovei, who learned Moses's story from her rabbi father; and Wouk playing himself, the novel comes into its own as a suspenseful narrative that asks fundamental questions: is Moses still relevant? Can this movie get made? Will true love prevail? The answers will not necessarily surprise, but getting to them is a fun ride, and though the epilogue, an address from Wouk, has the feel of a vanity project, in creating a contemporary version of Marjorie Morningstar, Wouk the author has made something old, and something very old, new again.
