The Parting Gift: A Novel

“An unabashed tale that does not pull punches and looks at love’s underside…This breathless story should only be read in one sitting. It hits hard and never lets up. Terse, brusque, etched on one’s inner thigh with an old serrated knife.” —André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name

This erotic tale of jealousy, obsession, and revenge is suffused with the rich flavors and intoxicating scents of Israel's Mediterranean coast.

An unnamed narrator writes a letter to an old college friend, Adam, at whose place he has been crashing since his abrupt return to the States from Israel. Now that the narrator is moving on to a new location, he finally reveals the events that led him to Adam's door, set in motion by a chance encounter with Uzi, an older man with whom the narrator has just had an intense sexual relationship.

From his first meeting with Uzi, the narrator is overwhelmed by an animal attraction that will lead him to derail his life, withdraw from friends and extend his stay in a small town north of Tel Aviv. As he becomes increasingly entangled in Uzi's life—and by extension the lives of Uzi's ex-wife and children—his passion turns sinister, ultimately threatening all around him.

Written in a circuitous style reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley novels, The Parting Gift is a page-turner and a shrewd exploration of the roles men assume, or are forced to assume.

Evan Fallenberg is the author of three novels and a translator of Hebrew fiction, plays and films. His work has won or been short-listed for numerous awards, including the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Stonewall Award for Literature, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the PEN Translation Prize. He teaches at Bar-Ilan University and is faculty co-director of the Vermont College of Fine Arts International MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation. Fallenberg is the recipient of residency fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, Banff Centre for the Arts, Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt and Sun Yat-sen University, and is the founder of Arabesque: An Arts and Residency Center in Old Acre.