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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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THE LOVER

Rebecca Sacks

The author of the acclaimed CITY OF A THOUSAND GATES returns with an intense, page-turning love story between a twenty-seven year old Canadian woman and a nineteen- year old Israeli soldier, set in contemporary Israel.
The story of Allison and Eyal unfolds primarily in Tel Aviv where Allie, a thoughtful and intelligent academic searching for a sense of where she belongs in the world, falls deeply and unexpectedly in love with a young Israeli doing his military service. Their love story is sensual, filled with pleasure, longing, fear, moments of deep connection, failures of communication, and ultimately, a quiet and devastating betrayal. Their romance has a rhythm private and unique to them: when he is away on military missions, they write love letters; when he returns home for weekends, they are entwined and inseparable.

Allie is embraced by Eyal's family, and their acceptance is very important to her. But when Eyal returns home from an invasion of Gaza, to which he has a surprising emotional response, Allie has changed so radically that her betrayal of her lover feels both shocking and tragic.

THE LOVER is a provocative, immersive, gorgeously written love story reminiscent of Marguerite Duras' classic novel. Both books portray a seductive love affair in a colonial setting, atmospheric and rich with foreign detail, that raises unsettling questions about inequality, conflict, intensity, war, and danger. At once beautiful and disturbing, propulsive and poignant, THE LOVER will entrance readers and hold them spellbound.

Rebecca Sacks a graduate of the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. She is the recipient of a 2019 Canada Council for the Arts grant and the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation's 2019 Henfield Prize in fiction writing. She has been awarded fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and the Mellon-Sawyer Documenting War Seminar Series. After graduating from Dartmouth College, she worked for several years at Vanity Fair before moving to Tel Aviv to pursue an M.A. in Jewish Studies. Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review Daily. She is the author of the acclaimed CITY OF A THOUSAND GATES, which was longlisted for the 2021 Center For Fiction First Novel Prize.
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Published 2023-08-01 by HarperCollins

Comments

...the book - and Allison's transformation - is deeply unsettling, and Sacks' talent as a novelist who takes on thorny, multifaceted, unanswerable questions is clearly unmatched... A brilliantly rendered novel raises crucial questions about identity, justice, war, and belonging.

The heroine of Sacks' poignant second novel (after CITY OF A THOUSAND GATES) revisits a summer romance with longing and the wisdom of hindsight..It adds up to a tender, affecting portrait of a bygone love.