A.B. Yehoshua Books In Order

Publication Order of Love and War Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Graphic Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

A.B. Yehoshua
Avraham Gabriel “Boolie” Yehoshua was born to a third generation Jerusalem family of Sephardi origin from Salonika, Greece. Yaakov Yehoshua, his dad, who was the son and grandson of rabbis, was an author and scholar that specialized in the history of Jerusalem. Malka Rosillio, his mom, was born and raised in Mogador, Morocco, France, and immigrated with her parents in the year 1932. Avraham grew up in Jerusalem’s Kerem Avraham neighborhood.

He went to Gymnasia Rehavia municipal high school in Jerusalem. While a youth, he was active in the Hebrew Scouts. Yehoshua, after finishing his studies, drafted to the Israeli army, where he served as a paratrooper from 1954 to 1957, and participated in the 1956 Sinai War. After he studied philosophy and literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he started teaching. He lived in Jerusalem’s Neve Sha’anan neighborhood.

His works have been translated and published in 28 countries, with many being adapted into television, film, theater, and opera. “Mr. Mani” being adapted for television as a five-part multilingual series by Ram Loevy.

He lived and taught in Paris and served as the General Secretary of the World Union of Jewish Students from 1963 to 1967. In 1972, he taught Comparative and Hebrew Literature at the University of Haifa, where he held Full Professor rank. In 1975, he was a writer-in-residence at St. Cross College, Oxford. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard (1977), University of Chicago (1988, 1997, 2000), and Princeton (1992).

In 1961, he won the ACUM Prize. Then in 1972, he received the Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Literary Works. In 1983, he was given the Brenner Prize and in 86 got the Alterman Prize. He won two National Jewish Book Awards in 1990 for “Five Seasons”, and again in 1993, the Israel Prize for Literature in 1995, and “A Woman in Jerusalem” won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Yehoshua died of esophageal cancer at the age of 85 on June 14, 2022 in Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. He was married to Rivka (a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst), from 1960 until she died in 2016.

“The Liberated Bride” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2003. Yochanan Rivlin, who’s a professor at Haifa University, is a guy of boundless, often naive curiosity. Hagit, his wife and is a district judge, is tolerant of just about everything, however her husband’s prevarications and faults. Their frequent arguments notwithstanding, they’re a well-adjusted couple with two grown sons.

When a student of Rivlin’s, a young Arab bride from a village in the Galillee, gets assigned to help with his research in recent Algerian history, this two pronged mystery starts developing. While they probe the causes of the bloody Algerian civil war, Rivlin also becomes obsessed with his son’s failed marriage.

Rivlin’s search takes him to a number of improbable escapades. In this comedy of manners, at once highly entertaining and deeply serious, Yehoshua cleverly depicts characters from disparate sectors of Israeli life, united above all by this very human for, and fear of, the truth in life and politics.

“The Retrospective” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2013. A thrilling novel which explores the relationship between art and life through the eyes of a film director, his screenwriter, and their muse.

Yair Moses, an aging film director, has just been invited to the Spanish pilgrim city of Santiago de Compostela for a retrospective of his early work. While he and Ruth, his longtime muse and leading actress, settle into their hotel room, Moses notices the painting over his bed, which depicts a classical legend of a starving old prisoner male nursing at the breast of his daughter, and it’s called Caritas Romana.

For the very first time in decades, he recalls that infamous scene from one early film he worked on which led to his estrangement from his difficult yet brilliant screenwriter, Trigano, who is Ruth’s ex-lover.

Throughout the retrospective, Moses is unsettled, and straddles both the present and the past, and upon returning to Israel, he decides to travel to the south in order to find the elusive Trigano and propose they work together again. However the screenwriter demands a steep price for such a reconciliation, one that’ll have lasting and odd consequences.

Intellectual, searching, and original, this is a probing meditation on the limits of memory, mortality, and the struggle of artistic creation by one of the world’s most esteemed writers.

“The Tunnel” is a stand alone novel and was released in 2020. Zvi Luria has started losing his memory. At the start he just makes tiny mistakes, forgetting first names and taking the wrong kid home from his grandson’s kindergarten, however he knows that things are just going to get worse. He is 73 and a retired road engineer. His neurologist hints at the path that his illness may take and suggests ways of battling it, with the help of Dina, his wife.

Dina, who is a respected pediatrician, is keen for him to go back to meaningful activity, and suggests that he volunteer to work with his former colleagues at the Israel Roads Authority. It’s how Luria finds himself at the Ramon Crater in the Negev desert planning this secret road for the army with the son of an old colleague. However there is a mystery about a certain hill on the route of this road. Who are the people that live there and why’re they trapped? And should the hill be flattened and the family evicted, or should a tunnel underneath it be built?

With great tenderness and humor, Yehoshua portrays love between Luria and his wife while they confront the challenges of his illness. Right when his sense of identity gets more compromised, then does find himself on this extraordinary adventure involving people more vulnerable than he is. Which enables a rich meditation on the entwined identities of Israeli Jews and Palestinians as well as the nature of memory itself.

A.B. Yehoshua weaves a masterful story about a loving and long marriage, interlaced with caustic humor and biting social commentary.