num_pages: 237
description: A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of "gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee," the bakery’s owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman’s life take shape—she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful—he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love. At once profoundly serious and highly entertaining, A. B. Yehoshua astonishes us with his masterly, often unexpected turns in the story and with his ability to get under the skin and into the soul of Israel today.
language: English
title: A Woman in Jerusalem
titlecomplete: A Woman in Jerusalem
genres: Fiction, Israel, Book Club, Jewish, Literature, Novels, Contemporary, Adult Fiction, 21st Century, Unfinished
ratings_count: 1638
places: Israel
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize
publisher: Harvest Books