Husband and Wife

From the Israeli author of Love Life: a highly polished and . . . beautifully written story that carries great weights of meaning (Kirkus Reviews). Zeruya Shalev achieved international literary stardom with her novel Love Life, which The Washington Post Book World called a brutally honest and often brilliant tour of individual and family psychology. In Husband and Wife, she takes us into the heartbreak and compromise of a diseased marriage that may or may not be capable of healing. Na'ama and Udi Newman, together with their young daughter Noga, lead a quiet domestic life. But their idyll abruptly ends when Udi-a perfectly healthy man-wakes up one morning unable to move his legs. The doctors can find no physical explanation for his paralysis. It appears to be a symptom, not of illness, but of something far more insidious. This mysterious disruption soon reveals a vicious cycle of jealousy, paranoia, resentment, and accumulated injuries that now threaten to tear their small family apart. In a rush of hallucinogenic imagery, Husband and Wife captures the vulnerability and deceptive comforts of lives intertwined, offering an acutely intimate portrait of a relationship (Donna Rifkind, The Baltimore Sun). Nearly impossible to look away from. -Elle