Friendly Fire
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"A fine novel of loss and hope" set in modern Israel and East Africa, from the author of A Woman in Jerusalem (TheBoston Globe).
During Hanukkah, Ya'ari, an engineer, and his wife, Daniela, are spending an unaccustomed week apart after years of marriage. While he's kept busy juggling the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, his children, and his grandchildren, Daniela flies from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of her older sister.
There she confronts her anguished brother-in-law, Yirmi, whose soldier son was killed six years earlier in the West Bank by "friendly fire." Yirmi is now managing a team of African researchers digging for the bones of man's primate ancestors—as he desperately strives to detach himself from every shred of his identity, Jewish and Israeli.
From an author who has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, this is "a haunting book . . . that will resonate for a long time in the minds of its readers" (The Washington Post Book World).
"As in each of his wisely tragicomic novels, Yehoshua orchestrates nearly absurd predicaments that serve as conduits to Israel's confounding conflicts, which so intensely and sorrowfully encapsulate our endless struggle for peace and belonging." —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Celebrated Israeli novelist Yehoshua (A Woman in Jerusalem) explores the power of grief and bitterness in a blunt drama studded with political, historical and religious significance. In Tel Aviv, 60-year-old Amotz Ya'ari is separated for a week from his wife Daniela when she flies to Tanzania to mourn her dead sister, Shuli, and visit with brother-in-law Yirmi. Soon after Daniela arrives in Tanzania, where Yirmi works for a team of archeologists at an excavation, it becomes apparent that another death that of Yirmi and Shuli's son, an Israeli soldier who was killed by friendly fire seven years before the novel begins preoccupies the family. Back in Tel Aviv, Amotz, both professionally and personally, shows himself to be a compassionate and deeply moral man a striking counterpoint to his self-centered wife. The scenes at Yirmi's dig are lit with hope for Africa's future, though the narration can be na ve about the continent's present and tends to caricaturize Daniela. In contrast, Yehoshua's descriptions of life in Israel are full and revelatory, and his despairing view of entrenched resentments becomes a stirring plea for empathy and rationality.
