A sweeping historical epic following four generations of a single family as they struggle to hold on to their land and each other.
ADAMA
by Lavie Tidhar
Head of Zeus, September 2023
(via Zeno Agency)
There is no land without blood, and i water this land with the blood of my men.
Ruth’s family were in Budapest when the Nazis came.
Now Ruth is in Palestine, amid the bare hills inland from Haifa, breaking the rocky soil of an unyielding land before it breaks her.
With her comrades, her fellow kibbutzniks, she will build a better world. There will be green grass, orange trees and pomegranates, a land that is their own and no one else’s.
So they till their fields, dig their wells, build their homes and forge a new way of living, fiercely proud of their shared pursuit of a dream.
But as one generation begets another, the dream unravels, twisted into a dark tapestry of secrets and lies; sacrificed for revenge, forbidden love and murder.
Lavie Tidhar‘s work encompasses literary fiction (Maror, ADAMA and Six Lives), cross-genre classics such as Jerwood Prize winner A Man Lies Dreaming (2014) and World Fantasy Award winner Osama (2011) and genre works like the Campbell and Neukom prize winner Central Station (2016). He has also written comics (Adler, 2020) and children’s books such as Candy (2018) and A Child’s Book of the Future (2024). He is a former columnist for the Washington Post and a current honorary Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence at the American International University in London.
It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won’t come out.
We sometimes worry that we’ve been a coward, hesitated too long – and missed out on something that would have made us a better, happier person, with better-looking and more fun pets and partners. This is what Stanišić’s new stories are about: the constant, gnawing feeling that maybe you should have taken the road less travelled, made the less obvious choice, told a lie for once. Like the cleaner, for instance, who, holding a goat’s-hair brush in their hands, finally decides to take the matter of life into their own hands too. Or like the author who travels to Heligoland for the first time, only to discover that he’s actually been there before. Or like the father who’s prepared to cheat, if that’s what it takes to finally beat his eight-year-old son at Memory…
In 1926, full of hope and longing, the ambitious young sculptor Constantin Avis moves to New York. A famous gallery owner wants to take him under his wing and facilitate his great breakthrough in this city of dreams. Constantin floats through his new life buoyed by an exciting new love affair, and the prospect of success – but threatens to lose touch with reality. How far can his art really take him? A whole century later, this is the question that Dora sets out to answer. It is early springtime on the Ligurian coast, and she is working on a novel about Constantin. She has moved here together with her son and a nanny, to find the peace that usually eludes her in her everyday life as an artist and mother. But the deeper she dives, the more her own story becomes intertwined with Constantin’s. Eventually, she realises that she can answer the sculptor’s questions only with her own life. An exceptionally charming tale of the unbreakable bond between art and life – as light as a feather, and yet so powerful that its thoughts will linger with you for a long time.