Scenes from Village Life

by Amos Oz
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An unsettling portrait of a fictional village from the Israeli master storyteller

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Synopsis

Amos Oz’s new fiction presents a surreal and unsettling portrait of a village in Israel. A picture of the community takes shape across seven stories, in which a group of characters appear and return. The book concludes with an eighth story, shocking and strange, from another place and a distant time. Each villager is searching for something, yet in this almost dreamlike world nothing is certain, nothing is resolved. An old man grumbles to his daughter about the unexplained digging and banging he hears under the house at night. A stranger turns up at a man’s door, to persuade him that they must get rid of his ageing mother in order to sell the house. A man goes to his neighbours for regular evenings of music and old pioneer songs, but is overwhelmingly drawn to the tragic heart of the house. Behind each episode is another, hidden story – a glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday existence. In beautifully simple, poetic language, Amos Oz peers into the darkness of our lives in this powerful, hypnotic work.

Editorial Reviews

"What is most arresting is the cumulative effect of his narratives and the relationships between three generations of Israelis in a territory that has too many ghosts" - Julia Pascal, Independent

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