The Liberated Bride [Paperback]

a magnificent, often comic, and humanely inexorable journey

sprawling, ambitious, maddeningly brilliant

Professor Yohanan Rivlin has two obsessions, the first and most ambitious, is to understand the Arab mind - no mean feat in itself though perhaps made easier by the fact that he lives and works with Israeli Arabs. The second - and more personal, though equally hard to grasp - is to understand the failure of his elder son's marriage. Rivlin's two quests lead him to extraordinary - and at times highly entertaining - encounters with very disparate people, where the personal becomes intertwined with the political, as he searches out the truth both in politics and life.

"When I began ['The Liberated Bride', in 1998], the peace treaty was in trouble but the breakthrough in Oslo was done, so my interest was in writing about our relationship with Israeli Arabs. ... This is a book about borders - how far can a father-in-law go behind his son's back to help him? What does a man say to his wife and what should he not say? What will be the frontier between us and the Palestinian state? For all our history as Jews we were crossing borders, it was Zionism that brought us back to the idea of having borders. After the six day war, the abolition of the border poisoned the two peoples. ... When the intifada started I didn't change the plan of the book because I didn't know that it would last so long and that it would have such a profound effect. The Arab Israelis were the main protagonists, not the Palestinians. It's very hard to describe an enemy from the inside but understanding the Arabs is the key to understanding ourselves, our crisis!
in the world and without solving it we will deteriorate."
(from an interview with Linda Grant, printed in The Guardian (Review), 31 January 2004)

Born in Jerusalem in 1936, A.B. Yehoshua is one of Israel's pre-eminent writers. He teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa.