To the End of the Land

Narrator Arthur Morey starts off his reading with a pitch-perfect conversation between teens who are quarantined in a hospital. From there, the novel jumps forward to adulthood, revealing that the hospital stay led to a lifelong romantic triangle. The novel becomes one long conversation between two corners of that triangle during a hike across Israel. Morey enlivens a story that could have been monotonous by giving the two troubled hikers strong personalities. There's more than romance, though. The horrors of war seep through in scenes of a mother's anguish, a child's irrational fears, the rambling rant of a trapped soldier. The novel is long, but it has rewards for the thoughtful listener, and Morey's performance is strong. J.A.S. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

July 12, 2010
Israeli novelist Grossman returns with an epic yet intimate story of an Israeli family and the shadow of war that haunts it. A love triangle between Ora, Avram, and Ilan ends when Avram returns to war, and Ora settles down with Ilan to raise two sons. But when her youngest is called to duty, Ora flees for Galilee, dragging with her Avram, who, deeply scared by his experience as a POW during the Yom Kippur War, has refused contact with her for years. Their shared history poignantly reveals the way conflict, war, and the loss of humanity have traumatized generations of people living in this region. Grossman, whose own soldier son was killed during the writing of this novel, connects a wide-reaching canvas of battles and bombings to the intimate realities of the relationships among family and friends. Although the atmosphere of paranoia and the flood of details can overwhelm, they also connect the reader to the characters so hypnotically that this nearly 600-page literary novel reads like a thriller.