Husband And Wife
Zeruya Shalev
Available as Paperback
Na’ama Newman wakes up one morning to a new reality. Her husband Udi, formerly a healthy, active tour guide, announces that he can no longer move his legs. The paralysis is diagnosed as psychosomatic - Udi has gone on strike and Na’ama must cope with the crisis, while balancing the demands of work and motherhood.
The plot moves swiftly from this starting point, and Shalev depicts the complexities of intimate relationships with daring perceptiveness. It is a unique and intense novel, compulsively readable and extraordinarily insightful.
Husband and Wife brilliantly captures the vulnerability and deceptive comforts of lives intertwined, as well as the near impossibility of setting out to disentangle them without any casualties. With this novel, Zeruya Shalev is sure to gain the renown in the UK that she already enjoys around the world.
“When I began to read, a kind of enchanting calm descended upon me … This book deserves to be read at least twice … I really think and feel it is a classic.”
ma’ariv, Israel
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“A breathtaking narrative journey through the hell of a crumbling marriage … Written with a cool eye and a big heart, this is a love story for the 21st century.”
das Buche Der Woche, Germany
“No short quote could capture the orgiastic design of the prose. There is an irresistible frenzy in the language … one puts the book aside, convinced that this spring, no other book will compete with Shalev’s masterpiece.”
die Zeit, Germany
Zeruya Shalev
ZERUYA SHALEV, poet and novelist, was raised on a kibbutz in Israel and now lives in Jerusalem. She has a Master’s degree in biblical studies and is chief literary editor of an Israeli publishing house. Love Life is her first work of fiction to be translated into English; it has also been translated into eight other languages.