Judas

About the Book

Amos Oz's first major novel in a decade - since A Tale of Love and Darkness, which sold over 100,000 copies Shmuel, a young, idealistic student, is drawn to a mysterious handwritten note on a campus noticeboard. This takes him to a strange house, where an elderly invalid man requires a paid companion, to argue with and read to him. But there is someone else in the house, tooa A woman, who is trailed by ghosts from her past. Shmuel is captivated by her, a sexual obsession which evolves into gentle love and devotion; and he is pulled to the old man, an intellectual obsession which also evolves into gentle love and devotion. Shmuel begins to uncover the house's tangled history and, in doing so, reaches an understanding that harks back not only to the beginning of the Jewish-Arab conflict, but also the beginning of Jerusalem itself - to Christianity, to Judaism, to Judas. Set in the still-divided Jerusalem of 1959-60, Judas is an exquisite love story and coming-of-age tale, and a radical rethinking of the concept of treason. It is a novel steeped in desire and curiosity from one of Israel's greatest living writers.

About the Author :
Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz is the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into over forty languages, including his brilliant semi-autobiographical work, A Tale of Love and Darkness. He has received several international awards, including the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Frankfurt Peace Prize and the 2013 Franz Kafka Prize. He lives in Israel and is considered a towering figure in world literature.

Review :
Judas is many-layered, thought-provoking and – in its love story – delicate as a chrysalis, this is an old-fashioned novel of ideas that is strikingly and compellingly modern. A very absorbing addition to his remarkable oeuvre This book is compassionate as well as painfully provocative, a contribution to some sort of deeper listening to the dissonances emerging from deep within the politics and theology of Israel and Palestine. After almost two dozen books that track changes in both heart and state with untiring strength and subtlety, the Israeli master has delivered one of the boldest of all his works… Nicholas de Lange, Oz’s distinguished translator, steers these virtuoso transitions between debate and domesticity with unerring skill… Oz can imagine, and inhabit, treachery of every stripe. But he keeps faith with the art of fiction. A big, beautiful novel… Funny, wise and provoking. challenging, complex and strangely compelling… The ideas at the novel’s centre have great vitality and force. The philosophical passages bristle with linguistic energy, scriptural references and dense detail, vividly conveyed in Nicholas de Lange’s translation. It is rich in material to grapple with. Oz engages with urgent questions while retaining his right as a novelist to fight shy of answers: it’s a mark of his achievement that the result isn’t frustrating but tantalising.

A masterpiece: command of the word, mastery of construct, the ability to stimulate all the senses of the reader.

Judas is a rich and thrilling novel, one of the most interesting books published this year.

Amos Oz belongs to the great authors of world literature

Judas is a great novel that only Oz could have written…perhaps his finest work.

Utterly spellbinding ... an especially urgent and profoundly universal work ...Judas is a stately but thoroughly entertaining work, brimming with intricate storylines and characters who are brilliantly alive and get under one's skin.

Oz has written one of the most triumphant novels of his career

Judas is deeply humane, touching and loving. Incredible literature Once again, Amos Oz has given us an absolute, necessary masterpiece He’ll no doubt be overlooked for the Nobel Prize yet again next month – this novel shows just how ludicrous that is. [Judas is] quietly provocative… Aided by Nicholas de Lange’s lucid translation from the Hebrew, it challenges you to think afresh about stories and histories whose interpretations can seem chiseled in stone. A heart-breaking meditation on roads not taken, and collisions yet to come. It is a tribute to the author’s gifts (and to those of his long-time translator Nicholas de Lange) that the novel is so fluid and evocative, at once intellectually stimulating and brimming with humanity… [Oz’s] empathy for human weakness, which has always marked his writing, saturates this extraordinary, rich novel. Judas deepens the reader’s understanding of conflicts that arguably seem more irresolvable today than they did in 1960… In Lange’s lively translation, the sense of place and period is powerful. Oz has written so well for so long, the craft shows. Judas reads quickly, and gracefully, without a superfluous page.