A Room

A monumental, subversive classic of twentieth-century literature jailed upon its publication as one of the finest novels ever written in Hebrew, A Room is in the league of Gravity's Rainbow or The Recognitions: 

A bedraggled detective is dispatched to an IDF base where a man was burned alive while making a training film. An art student in Paris breaks into a morgue to recreate Mantegna's Lamentation of Christ. A scripture (with commentary!) tells of a mythical nation uniting to construct a monument to their deity, then falling into chaos when no one can agree on its precise form or dimensions. 

Youval Shimoni was born in Jerusalem in 1955. He studied cinema at Tel Aviv University and first began publishing fiction in 1990. Shimoni is a senior editor at Am Oved publishers; he also teaches creative writing at Tel Aviv and Haifa Universities. He has been awarded the Bernstein Prize (2001) and the Prime Minister's Prize (2005)

Born in South Africa, Michael Sharp currently lives in Israel where he produces radio programs for Israel Radio. A Room is his first translation.