Friendly Fire

A Novel

A. B. Yehoshua, Stuart Schoffman

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN:
  9780547427553
• Subtopic: Literature General

"A fine novel of loss and hope" set in modern Israel and East Africa, from the author of A Woman in Jerusalem ( The Boston Globe).
During Hanukkah, Ya'ari, an engineer, and his wife, Daniela, are spending an unaccustomed week apart after years of marriage. While he's kept busy juggling the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, his children, and his grandchildren, Daniela flies from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of her older sister.
 
There she confronts her anguished brother-in-law, Yirmi, whose soldier son was killed six years earlier in the West Bank by "friendly fire." Yirmi is now managing a team of African researchers digging for the bones of man's primate ancestors—as he desperately strives to detach himself from every shred of his identity, Jewish and Israeli.
 
From an author who has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, this is "a haunting book . . . that will resonate for a long time in the minds of its readers" ( The Washington Post Book World).
 
"As in each of his wisely tragicomic novels, Yehoshua orchestrates nearly absurd predicaments that serve as conduits to Israel's confounding conflicts, which so intensely and sorrowfully encapsulate our endless struggle for peace and belonging." — Booklist

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Second Candle
• Third Candle
• Fourth Candle
• Fifth Candle
• Sixth Candle
• Seventh Candle
• Eighth Candle
• Sample Chapter from THE RETROSPECTIVE
• Buy the Book
• About the Author