In this first volume of a trilogy by the celebrated Israeli poet, novelist, and musician Shimon Adaf, meet Elish Ben Zaken: a lapsed rock critic, sometime philosopher, and wholly unlikely private investigatorAt age thirty, Elish Ben Zaken has found himself in a life he never imagined. As a university student, Elish was an esteemed rock-music critic for local newspapers; now, disenchanted with an increasingly commercialized music scene, he has joined a private investigation agency where he is content to be a “clerk of small human sins”—a finder of stolen cars and wayward husbands. But when a disconcertingly amiable detective asks him to look into the suicide of an infamous philosophy professor—and the police file contains unexpected information about the already-solved murder of Dalia Shushan, a celebrated singer and songwriter—Elish’s natural curiosity is piqued. And when violence begins to dog the steps of his investigation, he knows that dangerous secrets are at hand. Haunted by the
In the concluding volume of Shimon Adaf’s genre-exploding detective trilogy, Elish Ben-Zaken is dead—it seems—but his niece, living in a grim, militaristic future, won't give up the investigation of her uncle’s cold casesIn 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
In Shimon Adaf’s sequel to One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset, Elish Ben Zaken has retired from investigating and taken up writing detective novels—but when a new case draws him to a town on the Israel-Gaza border, he faces an existential threat unlike any he’s ever knownThese days, Elish Ben Zaken has traded working as a private investigator for writing detective novels based on unsolved cases from the past. He appears to live an ordinary writer’s life: meeting with his agent, attending literary conferences. But all is not quite right with Elish, who cannot escape his past so easily, especially when his sister’s daughter, Tahel, a teenager and aspiring sleuth herself, calls on him for help. Tahel has uncovered a mystery: a young woman boarded a bus in Beersheva on a Thursday evening and stepped off in Sderot, close to the Gaza border, on Sunday evening. A bus ride that should have lasted an hour instead took three days, and the young woman remembers none of it.To assist Tahel—and
Shimon Adaf and Lavie Tidhar are two of Israel’s most subversive and politically outspoken writers.Growing up on opposite sides of the Israeli spectrum – Tidhar in the north of Israel in the Zio
