An extraordinary achievement...moving, many-layered, powerful, yet written with beautiful delicacy of touch, is a work of redemption... Combining the compassionate wisdom of the moralist with a true artist's creative imagination, this book deserves the widest possible audience

Bold, grand, mad, an astonishing meditation on art, religion, love, politics and war, despatched in language which is funny, ferocious and enraptured

A courageous novel, the first attempt by an Israeli author of the post-1967 generation to come to terms with the consequences of the Occupation, to articulate how 'the conqueror is also the conquered, and injustice has teeth in its tail'

Extreme, enormous, almost embarrassingly good, a first novel whose very last page somehow fuses together the political and spiritual currents running through modern day Israel

At once sensitive, humane, elegiac and devoid of optimism, save a vague faith in love

Masterful irony and passion... the sustained poetic intensity of many passages is impressive

From its very first pages one is aware of Grossman's potential range and originality...Khilmi, an Arab storyteller, is the novel's great imaginative narrative achievement... What a rare pleasure to read a novel in which the novelist's narrative and ideas are so gripping, they are worth arguing about! Here we have authentic talent

Grossman has made a habit of peeling away the camouflage that obfuscates Israel's more painful wounds

His fiction is earnest, sympathetic, human and highly readable