Amos Oz books

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Non-Fiction

Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization Reading Order

Standalone Novels

Amos Oz was born in Jerusalem in 1939, grew up in what he called a city of books and arguments, and lost his mother to suicide when he was twelve. Both facts shaped him profoundly. After her death he moved to Kibbutz Hulda, where he lived and worked for years and where the socialist Zionist idealism of his upbringing was tested against reality. He later taught Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University.

His fiction ranges from the realistic domestic novel — My Michael (1968) remains one of his most read — to fable and lyric prose. A Fine Balance it is not, but the comparison to Rohinton Mistry is apt: both writers use fiction to examine societies under pressure, communities trying to hold together against forces that want to tear them apart. A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004), his memoir, became an international phenomenon, translated into twenty-eight languages and adapted into a film by Natalie Portman. He received virtually every major literary prize available to a writer working outside the English language.