Pain

Winner of the Jan Michalski Prize

“Shalev reminds readers in keen, often brilliant prose that love, like pain, is indelible…a riveting exploration of family, sex and motherhood.” —New York Times Book Review

“Always incisive on the complexities of family and relationship dynamics…Shalev plunges the reader into a whirlwind story of impossible choices.” —The Guardian, Best New Books in Translation

“Shalev is especially attentive to the way that wounds never completely vanish, causing infinitely splintering recriminations and deliberations, and to the nuances of marriage, motherhood, middle-age and middle-class ennui. Iris’s spinning, capricious internal monologue is evoked with a dreamlike intensity…Pain burrows under the skin.” —Times Literary Supplement

“Shalev is a vivid and impassioned writer.” —Kirkus Reviews

“With its heady musings on what makes love pure, Pain is a blistering novel that pits passion against ordinary commitments.” —Foreword Reviews
 
“A complex meditation on the intricate ripples of cause and effect in our lives.” —Booklist
 
“A midlife crisis novel with a lot of meditation over choice and chance and how they impact what follows, this story by Shalev…effectively depicts contemporary Israeli life.” —Library Journal

“An impressive and vivid account of a woman trying to deal with events she cannot control…[Shalev’s] visceral and textured descriptions of physical discomfort and agonizing pain add another dimension to the protagonist’s psychological complexity…exquisite.” —Jerusalem Post

“There are few living writers who can capture the fluctuations of human feeling with greater nuance and precision than Zeruya Shalev. To read her novels is to enter a profoundly familiar but usually unarticulated geography, where the push and pull of sexual desire, familial attachment, and anticipatory fears mingle to create an atmosphere of psychological suspense so acute the reader loses herself entirely. Pain is yet another work by this remarkable artist that left me amazed.” —Siri Hustvedt, author of Memories of the Future

“Zeruya Shalev is one of my favorite contemporary writers, her work always spiky and original, and Pain is a searing book, a wild and ravenous story of family entanglement and impossible yearning.” —Lauren Groff, author of Florida and Fates and Furies

“A great book that ends with a therapeutic catharsis.” —Amos Oz, author of Judas
 
“Captivating…a brilliant reflection on the dominance of the past over the present, of the ideal over the real, of the couple over the individual.” —Elle (France)
 
“Shalev does what she does best: telling family tales of love, of redemption and of disillusion, rich in emotional strength, inviting the reader to be swallowed up by the story and giving a sense of purification when it is over…The novel celebrates pain and sheds light on its role in emotional life.” —Haaretz

Praise for Zeruya Shalev: 

“One of the most talented writers of our time.” —Leïla Slimani, New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny