More Than I Love My Life

From the winner of the International Booker Prize and one of the finest writers at work today, an epic and deeply moving novel about the legacy of war and trauma on three generations of women On a kibbutz in Israel in 2008, Gili, along with the entire community, is celebrating the 90th birthday of her grandmother Vera, the adored matriarch of a sprawling and tight-knit family. Onto the scene enters Nina: the iron-willed daughter who rejected Vera's care; and the absent mother who abandoned Gili when she was still a baby. Nina's return to the family after years of silence precipitates the gripping, heart-wrenching story that unfolds, in which mother, daughter and grandmother are forced to confront the past head-on. Together with Rafael - father to Gili, lover to Nina and step-son to Vera - the three women embark on an epic journey to the desolate island of Goli Otok, formerly part of Yugoslavia. It was here, five decades earlier, that Vera was held and tortured as a political prisoner. And it is here that the three women will finally come to terms with the terrible moral dilemma that Vera faced, and that permanently altered the course of their lives. More Than I Love My Life is a grand-scale and sweeping story about the power of love and loving with courage. A novel driven by faith in humanity even in our darkest moments, it asks us to confront our deepest held beliefs about a woman's duty to herself and to her children. von Grossman, David