About This Book
In a survey of contemporary Israeli literature, The New York Times Book Review singled out Zeruya Shalev's bold and intensely visceral novel of a young married woman's impassioned affair with an older man, which spent sixteen weeks as Israel's number-one best-seller. In the words of The Times, sexually explicit, dense with biblical allusions and psychological insight, Love Life broke all the barriers. When Yaara meets Aryeh, her father's boyhood friend, she is immediately drawn to his unflinching and assured presence. It is not long before she forsakes her sweet, devoted, and well-meaning husband for the powerful, mysterious older man who seems to embody all that she lacks: will, strength, and the key to her parents' inaccessible pasts. They embark on a heated affair that soon spirals toward the destructive as Yaara finds that the things in Aryeh that attract her also repel her with equal intensity. The narrative charts her struggle to navigate extreme terrain ranging from the sublime to the grotesque, the sacred to the profane, the liberating to the all-consuming. Cerebral, seductive, provocative, and profound, Love Life has been declared a true literary celebration . . . one of the most inspired novels ever written in Israeli literature (Tel-Aviv).
