The author's daring treatment of nine frenzied days in the life of a troubled Israeli family, Yehoshua's latest novel reconfirms his status as a shrewd analyst of domestic ordeals. Neatly and leisurely divided into "five seasons" following the death of the protagonist's wife of 30 years, this is a genuine and elegant portrait of a widower, Molkho, a middle-aged Sephardi, like his creator, and his heartfelt grief and painfully awkward readjustment to life as a single person. A passive, frugal civil servant obsessed with bodily functions and malfunctions, who diligently and celibately cared for his wife through a long illness, Molkho is a straight man, vulnerably ripe for absurd romantic entanglements. He is variously infatuated with or fancied by the barren, fey cast-off wife of a "born-again" Orthodox Jew; an aggressive lawyer, who is senior to him on the bureaucratic ladder; an Indian girl in a development town; and a Russian emigre Molkho helps to repatriate. Although much here is universally applicable, Yehoshua continues to advance his vision of Israel as the necessary, if chaotic and problematic, receptacle of the scattered remnants of world Jewry.

In this powerfully affecting novel—by the author of The Pawnbroker—Joe Berman, an immigrant at eighteen, fifty-nine now, and a hard-working Connecticut plumber, faces the loss of his deeply loved wife. The months that follow, months of wrath and rebellion during which he fights his way to a new idea of life, death, and God, are part of Berman's human season. But so are the years behind him, vividly evoked as the narrative travels back into the past.

Returning from his Carolina coast security job to upstate New York, Jack, haunted by memories of his dead wife and child, is hired to search for a lawyer's missing nephew, a search that leads into the dark underworld of his hometown.

"A devoted husband defies fate and risks everything to find the one universe where his beloved wife is still alive in this bold and thought-provoking novel. Dr. Jonas Cullen has spent his career as a groundbreaking physicist defying the odds. But on the best night of his life--the night his wife, Amanda, tells him they're finally having a baby--everything is taken away when a tragic car accident claims the lives of Amanda and their unborn child. Gutted by pain, Jonas sets out to find a way to bring back Amanda--or rather, find a parallel universe in which she's still alive. But that's easier said than done. As Jonas comes to understand all too well, the universe favors certain outcomes...and Amanda's death is one of them. Guggenheim's novel takes readers on a suspenseful journey, intercutting scenes of Jonas's frantic, present-day search across multiple realities with glimpses from the past of his unfolding romance and eventual marriage. Will Jonas and Amanda reunite in some other world, or will fate succeed in taking her from him forever?" --