Take Up and Read

In 2014 detective Elish Ben Zaken, looking into the vanishing of a teenage girl in Sderot, briefly met a poet named Nahum Farkash, and that encounter may have held the clue he failed to see. Fourteen years on, in a very different Israel, the unsolved case still shadows his niece and nephew, Tahel and Oshri. Who was Farkash, and why does his life unlock the riddle? Their story is told out of order by a narrator who refers to himself as 'I, that is, I' and who may be part of a still larger puzzle, as the novel tests whether the detective form can still bear such questions.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

608 pages in the original

Genres

Crime (assigned by AI)

Set in

Israel

First published

2017 by Dvir

Author's age

45 when first published

ISBN

9789655664768 (original)

9780374277970 (Picador, United States)