FOREST DARK

THE American writer Nicole Krauss’s impressive new novel is actually two stories for the price of one.

Retired and recently divorced, New York lawyer Jules Epstein is on a mission to divest himself of his worldly goods and wealth before he dies, and has come to the Tel Aviv Hilton in search of projects for his money.

At the same time, a novelist, having temporarily abandoned her Brooklyn home, husband and children, checks in to the same hotel, where she hopes seeing the pool in which she swam happily on childhood holidays will dissolve her writer’s block.

Jules disappears, with the only clue his briefcase found in the desert. Meanwhile, the novelist is embroiled in a story that claims Franz Kafka, far from dying of TB in 1924, secretly settled in Israel.

She is given a case full of works he supposedly wrote there, and finds herself in a baffling situation worthy of the great Czech writer himself. Brilliantly strange and utterly compelling.