At eighty-five, Teo, a renowned choreographer, finds new vitality after meeting Vivi, a waitress with a tumultuous past as an Israeli soldier. Their relationship rekindles Teo's youthful passions and confronts his wartime traumas, while Vivi grapples with her own haunting memories. As they navigate their complex histories, the duo's connection to art and life deepens, prompting a journey toward forgiveness and healing that spans cities from Warsaw to Tel Aviv. Their intertwined stories reveal the transformative power of love and creativity.
Awarded the 2009 Stonewall Prize for Fiction. Winner of the Publishing Triangle's 2008 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Twenty years have passed since Joseph left his family and his religious Israeli community when he fell in love with a man, the brilliant rabbi Yoel Rosenzweig. Now, for his fiftieth birthday, Joseph is preparing to have his five sons and the daughter-in-law he has never met spend the Sabbath with him in his Tel Aviv penthouse. This will be the first time he and his sons will have all been together in nearly two decades.
“An unabashed tale that does not pull punches and looks at love’s underside…This breathless story should only be read in one sitting. It hits hard and never lets up. Terse, brusque, etched on one’s inner thigh with an old serrated knife.” —André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name This erotic tale of jealousy, obsession, and revenge is suffused with the rich flavors and intoxicating scents of Israel's Mediterranean coast. An unnamed narrator writes a letter to an old college friend, Adam, at whose place he has been crashing since his abrupt return to the States from Israel. Now that the narrator is moving on to a new location, he finally reveals the events that led him to Adam's door, set in motion by a chance encounter with Uzi, an older man with whom the narrator has just had an intense sexual relationship. From his first meeting with Uzi, the narrator is overwhelmed by an animal attraction that will lead him to derail his life, withdraw from friends and extend his stay in a small town north of Tel Aviv. As he becomes increasingly entangled in Uzi's life—and by extension the lives of Uzi's ex-wife and children—his passion turns sinister, ultimately threatening all around him. Written in a circuitous style reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley novels, The Parting Gift is a page-turner and a shrewd exploration of the roles men assume, or are forced to assume.
"The year is 1895, Jaffa. Salah Rajani, a troubled Muslim boy living in a dilapidated mansion surrounded by orange groves, suffers from peculiar visions about a disaster which is set to befall his people. His life is changed by the arrival of a handsome young man, a dynamic Jewish settler, new to the city, by the name of Isaac Luminsky. Luminsky covets both the fertile lands of the Rajani estate and Salah's beautiful mother Afifa, and his friendship with the boy is destined to lead to violence and tragedy." "This rich and colourful novel is made up of the two opposing journals of Hilu's intriguing and extraordinary protagonists as they negotiate love, honour and betrayal in the changing world of nineteenth-century Palestine." --Book Jacket.
