**WINNER OF THE 2017 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE**

The award-winning and internationally acclaimed author of the To the End of the Land now gives us a searing short novel about the life of a stand-up comic, as revealed in the course of one evening's performance. In the dance between comic and audience, with barbs flying back and forth, a deeper story begins to take shape—one that will alter the lives of many of those in attendance.

In a little dive in a small Israeli city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, is doing a night of stand-up. In the audience is a district court justice, Avishai Lazar, whom Dov knew as a boy, along with a few others who remember Dov as an awkward, scrawny kid who walked on his hands to confound the neighborhood bullies. Gradually, as it teeters between hilarity and hysteria, Dov's patter becomes a kind of memoir, taking us back into the terrors of his childhood: we meet his beautiful flower of a mother, a Holocaust survivor in need of constant monitoring, and his punishing father, a striver who had little understanding of his creative son. Finally, recalling his week at a military camp for youth—where Lazar witnessed what would become the central event of Dov's childhood—Dov describes the indescribable while Lazar wrestles with his own part in the comedian's story of loss and survival. Continuing his investigations into how people confront life's capricious battering, and how art may blossom from it, Grossman delivers a stunning performance in this memorable one-night engagement (jokes in questionable taste included).

REVIEW

A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book

"Astounding. . . . [A] magnificently comic and sucker-punch-tragic excursion into brilliance." —Gary Shteyngart, The New York Times Book Review

"Unsettling and mesmerizing. . . . As beautiful as it is unusual, and it's nearly impossible to put down." —NPR

"Bewitching. . . . Brilliant, blistering." —The Washington Post

"[Grossman] has transcended genre; or rather, he has descended deep into the vaults beneath. . . . This isn't just a book about Israel: it's about people and societies horribly malfunctioning." —The Guardian

"As cunning and compelling as the stand-up guy at its center. In this funnyman's sad, grotesque performance, Grossman reaffirms his power to entertain and unnerve." —The Boston Globe

"Arresting. . . . Grossman seems to be channeling Philip Roth, circa Portnoy's Complaint, with a colloquial voice that badgers, bullies, berates and beseeches." —San Francisco Chronicle