ATale of Love and Darkness

Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz was 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. His last novel, Judas, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017 and won the Yasnaya Polyana Foreign Fiction Award. He 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 died in December 2018.

Discover Amos Oz’s most iconic work in this extraordinary memoir that is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation

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‘A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant’ Simon Schama

Amos Oz's remarkable, moving story takes us on a seductive journey through his childhood and adolescence, along Jerusalem's war-torn streets in the 1940s and '50s and into a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. Caught between them is one small boy with the weight of generations on his shoulders.

Oz dives into 120 years of family history and paradox, the saga of a Jewish love-hate affair with Europe that sweeps from Vilna and Odessa, via Poland and Prague, to Israel. Farce and heartbreak, history and humanity make up this story of clashing cultures and lives, of suffering and perseverance, of love and darkness.

‘Oz’s greatest work…not only his autobiography, but in a way the biography of Israel before it was created’ David Grossman, Observer

One of the funniest, most tragic and most touching books I have ever read. A testament to a family, a time and a place.A masterpieceOne of the most gripping, intense and moving autobiographies I have ever read.It sweeps across 120 years of family history, weaving a tragi-comic saga of love and books, of Jewish life and immigrant life the world over, and of the universal madness of families. Read it now - I promise you won't read a more brilliant book in a long, long while.Oz's account of his childhood is often very funny - and then profoundly moving, as he circles slowly round to confront the intolerable pain at the heart of it