Second Person Singular: A Novel

Sayed Kashua

ມ.ສ. 2012 · Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

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An award-winning novel of love, betrayal, and Arab Israeli identity by the author of Dancing Arabs—“one of the most important contemporary Hebrew writers” (Haaretz).
 
A successful Arab criminal attorney and a social worker-turned-artist find their lives intersecting under the most curious of circumstances. The lawyer has a thriving practice in Jerusalem, a large house, and a Mercedes. He speaks both Arabic and Hebrew, and lives with his wife and two young children. To maintain his image as a sophisticated Israeli Arab, he makes frequent visits to a local bookstore and picks up popular novels. But on one fateful evening, he decides to buy a used copy of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, a book his wife once recommended. Tucked in its pages, he finds a love letter, in Arabic . . . in his wife’s handwriting.
 
Consumed with suspicion and jealousy, he decides to hunt down the book’s previous owner—a man named Yonatan. But Yonatan’s identity is more complex than the attorney imagined. In the process of dredging up old ghosts and secrets, the lawyer breaks the fragile threads that hold all of their lives together.
 
Winner of the 2011 Bernstein Prize, Second Person Singular is “part comedy of manners, part psychological mystery” (The Boston Globe) that offers “sharp insights on the assumptions made about race, religion, ethnicity, and class that shape Israeli identity” (Publishers Weekly).
 
“[Kashua’s] dry wit shines.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“Kashua’s protagonists struggle, often comically . . . making his narratives more nuanced than some of the other Arabs writing about the conflict” —Newsweek
 
“Sayed Kashua is a brilliant, funny, humane writer who effortlessly overturns any and all preconceptions about the Middle East. God, I love him.” —Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

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Sayed Kashua was born in 1975 in a village called Tira, in the Galilee, and went on to study at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He writes a weekly column for Ha’aretz, Israel’s most prestigious newspaper. Kashua briefly moved back to his childhood village after growing disillusioned with life in Jerusalem, and it was at that time that the idea for this novel took shape. But after growing disenchanted with life there, he moved with his wife and two small children to Beit Safafa, another Arab village within Israel.