Pain
Ten years after she was seriously injured in a terrorist attack, the pain comes back to torment Iris, the heroine of Zeruya Shalev’s new novel. But that is not all: Eitan, the love of her youth also comes back into her life. And although their relationship ended many years ago, she was more deeply wounded when he left her than by the suicide bomber who blew himself up next to her.
Iris’s marriage is stalled. Her two children have grown up and are almost independent; she herself has become a dedicated, successful school principal. But now, after years of living without passion and joy, Eitan brings them back into her life. Unhappily, she must concoct all sorts of lies to conceal her love from her family, and the lies become more and more complicated. But can one ever restore the love of one’s youth?
Iris is in an impossible predicament, and in order to decide she tries to fathom whether her love with Eitan can heal all her pain, and more essentially, whether in the process she would have to hurt the people who are closest to her.
“GOLDEN” BOOK 2016 – More than 20,000 copies sold in Israel
- Languages
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Albanian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish
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German
Berlin, Berlin Verlag, 2015 -
French
Paris, Gallimard, 2017;
pback: Folio, 2018 -
Polish
Warsaw, WAB, 2016 -
Romanian
Bucharest, Polirom, 2016 -
Dutch
Amsterdam, Cossee, 2016 -
Italian
Milan, Feltrinelli, 2016 -
Chinese
Beijing, People's Literature, forthcoming -
Portuguese
Portugal, Elsinore, 2019; 2020 -
Russian
Moscow, Sinbad, forthcoming -
English
New York, Other Press, 2019 -
Lithuanian
Vilnius, Sofoklis, 2019 -
Czech
Prague, Prah, 2021 -
Turkish
Istanbul, Alkarga, 2022 -
Bulgarian
Plovdiv, Janet 45, forthcoming -
Italian
Milan, Feltrinelli, 2022 -
Romanian
Bucharest, Humanitas, 2022 -
Spanish
Barcelona, Acantilado, forthcoming -
Albanian
Tirana, Ombra, forthcoming
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| Title | Pain |
|---|---|
| Writer's Last Name | Shalev |
| Writer's First Name | Zeruya |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher (Hebrew) | Keter |
| No. Pages | 287pp. |
| Book title - Hebrew (phonetic) | Ke'ev |
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“A great book, that ends with a therapeutic catharsis.”
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“The original, complex and subversive nature of Shalev’s new novel emerges when we examine the way she treats the issue of pain in its literary-national context … Shalev submits to familiar paths in order to disrupt them from the inside and to change their direction and their destination. And she does this like a virtuoso, soaring but also meticulous, on the levels of both the structure and the style, as befits a great writer. ”
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“For the Israeli novelist, writing is first of all listening to her characters. "Pain” is an admirable testament to that… It is, among a thousand other things, an astonishing reflection on second chances and on obsession with the past.”
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“As a true archaeologist of the soul, Zeruya Shalev does neglects no thought.”
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“Zeruya Shalev does what she does best: telling family tales of love, of redemption and of disillusion, rich in emotional strength, inviting the reader to be swallowed up by the story and giving a sense of purification when it is over … Something in the familiarity of the story and the dramas that occur in it, and the manner in which it is resolved, creates a sense of intimacy… The novel celebrates pain and sheds light on its role in emotional life. ”