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Take Up and Read

#3 Lost Detective

Shimon Adaf Yardenne Greenspan

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English
Picador
29 November 2022
Series: Lost Detective
In the summer of 2014, at the height of the Gaza-Israel conflict, Elish Ben-Zaken met the poet and librarian Nahum Farkash in the border town of Sderot. The two men spoke only briefly, but in that brief encounter, Elish might have missed the key to unraveling the case of a Sderot woman who disappeared for three days, only to reappear with no memory of her time away.

In Take Up and Read, Shimon Adaf returns to Farkash's story. Attempting to defend the legacy of the singer Dalia Shushan-whose murder Elish investigated several years before-Farkash tries to impede the production of a new documentary about her life. Meanwhile, he reminisces about his past, reflecting on his experiences as a young religious boy growing up in Sderot.

Fourteen years later, in a militant Israel that has been distorted by catastrophic war, Elish's niece and nephew are haunted by their uncle's death and the failure of his 2014 investigation. As Tahel and Oshri conduct experiments in search of the truth, they draw near to the heart of a great conspiracy.

In this masterful conclusion to the Elish Ben-Zaken trilogy, Shimon Adaf brings together futuristic biotechnology, parallel universes, and Jewish mysticism, and the extent of his renovation of the detective novel comes finally and fully into view. Take Up and Read addresses a central concern of the trilogy, interrogating humankind's tenuous grasp on the boundaries of our selves, and the arbitrary connections between the body, consciousness, and perception.

By:  
Translated by:  
Imprint:   Picador
Country of Publication:   United States
Volume:   3
Dimensions:   Height: 210mm,  Width: 138mm,  Spine: 34mm
Weight:   518g
ISBN:   9780374277970
ISBN 10:   0374277974
Series:   Lost Detective
Pages:   688
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Shimon Adaf was born in Sderot, Israel, and now lives in Jaffa. A poet, novelist and musician, Adaf worked for several years as a literary editor at Keter Publishing House, and has also been a writer-in-residence at Iowa University. He leads the creative writing program and lectures on Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Yardenne Greenspan is a writer and Hebrew translator born in Tel Aviv and based in New York. Her translations have been published by Restless Books, St. Martin's Press, Akashic, Syracuse University, New Vessel Press, Amazon Crossing, and are forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Yardenne's writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Haaretz, Guernica, Literary Hub, Blunderbuss, Apogee, The Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, and Words Without Borders, among other publications. She has an MFA from Columbia University and is a regular contributor to Ploughshares.

Reviews for Take Up and Read (#3 Lost Detective)

Adaf concludes his epic Lost Detective Trilogy with an extraordinary blend of science fiction, crime, and high fantasy . . . As with the previous installments, Adaf's rich characterizations are complemented by the clever prose. The result is an instant classic. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) Shimon Adaf is my literary hero, a fearless explorer with the endless curiosity of a child and the skill of an Old Master, combined to unleash strange and wonderful masterpieces on the world. In his Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured. --Lavie Tidhar, author of By Force Alone


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