Husband and Wife

With Love Life, which The Washington Post Book World called "a brutally honest and often brilliant tour of individual and family psychology, " Zeruya Shalev achieved international literary stardom. In her newest offering, Husband and Wife, she takes us into the heartbreak and compromise of a diseased marriage that may or may not be capable of healing. The quiet rhythms of the family life of Na'ama and Udi Newman suddenly screech to a halt when Udi, a healthy, active man, wakes up one morning unable to move his legs. The doctors can find no physical explanation for his paralysis, and soon it becomes painfully clear that it is a symptom of something far less tangible and far more insidious. This one morning sets in motion a series of events that reveals a vicious cycle of jealousy, paranoia, resentment, and accumulated injuries that now threaten to tear the small family apart. Na'ama, always intent on upholding the structure of her marriage regardless of its rotting foundation, is now forced to see it for what it is and deal with the consequences. In a rush of hallucinogenic imagery, Husband and Wife brilliantly captures the vulnerability and deceptive comforts of lives intertwined, as well as the near impossibility of setting out to disentangle them without any casualties. With this novel, Zeruya Shalev is sure to gain the renown here in the United States that she already enjoys around the world. "One puts the book aside convinced that no other novel could equal Zeruya Shalev's masterpiece." -- Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Die Zeit (Germany)