A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of "gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee," the bakery's owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman's life take shape-she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful-he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love.At once profoundly serious and highly entertaining, A. B. Yehoshua astonishes us with his masterly, often unexpected turns in the story and with his ability to get under the skin and into the soul of Israel today. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Israel's master novelist (Mr. Mani) tells a spellbinding tale about a spellbinding woman whose luminous smile, swan's neck and Tatar eyes are so beguiling that even in death she can lead a man to fall in love with her. The woman is Yulia Ragayev, a Slavic immigrant to Israel who has been killed in a terrorist bombing and whose corpse lies unidentified in a morgue for a week. The man (who, like everyone in the novel except Yulia, remains nameless) is the human resources manager at the commercial bakery where Yulia worked as a cleaning woman. A muckraking article forces the bakery's owner to discover her identity and take action to restore her dignity. The owner orders the HR director to return Yulia's body to her son and mother in her native land for burial-a journey that turns into an opportunity for moral redemption for him after a series of stunning reversals. Throughout, Yulia remains a mystery: why did she come to, and cling to, Jerusalem when she wasn't Jewish? Questions of morality, dignity, identity, nationality and belonging are subtly explored in sometimes hallucinatory prose, fluently translated by Halkin. This short novel's layers reveal themselves only gradually and, once revealed, continue to compel and provoke. (Aug.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

He doesn't know it, but the manager of the human resources division of a bakery in Jerusalem is about to launch on a journey. A woman killed in a terrorist bombing has been traced to the bakery by a pay stub, and a nasty newspaper story condemns the owner's insensitivity in letting her languish nameless in the morgue. In fact, she's not currently an employee, but it's up to the manager to fix this public relations disaster, an assignment that leads him from the victim's shabby home all the way to Russia to deliver her body to her mother and son. While surmounting bureaucratic hurdles, the manager wrestles with issues of doing good. He's also painfully reminded of his strained relationships with his daughter and ex-wife. As might be expected from noteworthy Israeli author Yehoshua (The Liberated Bride), the writing is beautifully exact and the moral issues delivered with understated authority. Yet the protagonist's circumscribed nature and grinding battles to accomplish his goal can lend the narrative an airless and boxed-in feel. Nevertheless, any novel by Yehoshua should be strongly considered by literary and international fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/06.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Israeli novelist Abraham B. Yehoshua is best known for his realistic psychological novels, including Mr. Mani and Open Heart. In contrast to much earlier Israeli fiction, Yehoshua stresses the individual rather than ideology. He won the 1994 Israeli Prize.

(Bowker Author Biography) Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.