At Night’s End
Nir Baram
Translated by Jessica Cohen
A writer wakes up in a hotel room in an unfamiliar city. His clothes are muddy; he doesn’t know how long he’s been lying in bed. Yonatan came to participate in a literary festival that is long over—why is he still here? When he attempts to reconstruct his lost days, he learns that he told people at the festival that his best friend had died.
Except his friend is still alive.
Yonatan stays on in Mexico City, reluctant to return to his wife and infant son back home in Tel Aviv. Convinced that his closest friend, Yoel, is going to die, he struggles to preserve his sanity. But why is he so convinced? Does the answer lie in their childhood in Jerusalem, when it was them against the world?
At Night’s End is a compassionate and personal novel about an extraordinary friendship between two boys who become men haunted by a shared past. It is also a universal story of family and love, and of the power of memory and imagination.
INTERVIEWS ad REVIEWS
Jewish Book Council
andAt Night’s End
‘One of the most intriguing writers in Israeli literature today.’
‘This book will crawl under your skin and will not let go.‘
‘Skilfully, Baram plunges into the world in between: between life and death, childhood, adolescence and adulthood, between being a child and being a father, love and hate, day and night, intoxication and sobriety.’
‘Baram is the best writer in his generation with no comparison.’
‘Baram’s novels have the flair, emotional depth and wealth of ideas of the great 19th-century Russian authors. A complex, deeply felt but never sentimental bildungsroman…A wonderful tribute to people dearest to him.‘
‘A spectacular accomplishment by one of the most wonderful Hebrew writers.’
‘The combination of honesty and lies, which the novel adapts from the tragic pact between the two boys, allows the words to accrue, to turn into pictures and scenes, into fine prose.’
‘Virtuosic.’
‘A rare book in Israel’s literary landscape…Depicts the past in the most profound way without a shred of romanticising.’
‘One of the most beautiful bildungsroman books I have read. A novel about a profound and moving friendship, about pain and about life…Rush out to read it.’
