Mr Mani [Paperback]

Mr Mani New Statesman and Society)

Yehoshua's minutely researched novel ramifies out from the city to record the rich and wretched elements that have gone into the founding and continuation of the nation whose centre it has once again become.

It is extraordinarily skilful to have captured the Jewish mixture of suffering and revival, despair and messianic hope, without in any way spelling out such heavy themes.

A.B. Yehoshua has created a historical and psychological universe - nearly biblical in the range and penetration of its enchanting "begats" - with an amazingly real Jerusalem at its centre.

For this is more than just a tale of one eccentric family; it has the relentlessness of the Old Testament, the contentiousness of Job. The Manis not only pass down their sense of guilt, the source of their quixotic and often tragic fate, they ask in each generation what it means to be a Jew: are we not all from the same seed, are we not all "Jews forgetful of being Jews"?

Yehoshua is a marvellous story teller but also a profoundly political writer, always arguing for uncertain humanism rather than zealous nationalism in a country where everyone lives on the front line.

Six generations of the Sephardi Mani family are chronicled in this profound and passionate Mediterranean epic, which moves backwards from the 1980s to the mid-nineteenth century. The story comprises of five conversations, each centering on the fate of a different member of the Mani family, and in each the responses of one person are absent. Mr. Mani is surprisingly humorous, full of extraordinary historical perspectives, and deeply wise and compassionate. It is an imaginative tour-de-force.

A. B. Yehoshua is one of Israel's pre-eminent novelists. He has been awarded the prestigious Israel Prize for his lifetime's creative contribution to Israel, the National Jewish Book Award in the US, the Jewish Quarterly- Wingate Prize in the UK and was shortlisted in 2005 for the first Man Booker International Prize.