Accidents
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A captivating first novel of family, sex, love, and death from an "extraordinary" writer of "remarkable emotional power"
(Maureen Howard, Los Angeles Times Book Review)
For Shira Klein, Yonatan Luria, and his daughter, Dana, it is winter-winter at work, winter among friends, winter at home, and winter of the heart. Yonatan is a marginal writer, a fifty-year-old widower left to raise his child alone. When he meets Shira, a bestselling author paralyzed by stage fright, the thaw begins as man, woman, and girl enter a halting romance, alternately tender and belligerent, generous and withdrawn.
To the accompaniment of a full chorus of voices-of friends, neighbors, ex-lovers, parents-speaking from the past as well as the present, this family in the making gropes its way toward the comfort of love while navigating through ordinary pains: a dying father, angry children, wounding moments, and a distressing difference in the writers' levels of success which they wish would vanish even as it grows.
An ensemble story marked by Yael Hedaya's exquisite sensitivity, Accidents follows its cast through fragility, vulnerability, and joy, accruing the small events of unremarkable days to produce a grand vision of the shared life. Rarely has the fictional world of family been plumbed with such knowingness, humor, and love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though the three novellas of Hedaya's Housebroken (2001) are funny and accomplished, they do not prepare one for the depth of her new novel, a slow-motion Tel Aviv love story, in which a new couple finds their relationship haunted by past affairs. Yonatan Luria is a famous, 50-ish writer whose novels are less successful each time out, and he has only begun to try to work again, two years after his wife's death; first time novelist Shira Klein is so surprised by the success of her book that she calls upon her boring ex, who sustained her while she wrote it, to see if he's still available. Hedaya expertly details Yonatan's and Shira's varying and more or less depressing circumstances until they meet at a dinner party, and the usual skittish evasions of courtship and early dating ensue. Hedaya has an unerring sense of the fear involved in attempting intimacy, and her book contains one of the best descriptions of bad sex with the wrong person (in an attempt to avoid the right person) ever. By the end, hope reigns for this accidental family-in-the-making.
