One of America´s most important novelists (New York Times), the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The History of Love, conjures an achingly beautiful and breathtakingly original novel about personal transformation that interweaves the stories of two disparate individuals--an older lawyer and a young novelist--whose transcendental search leads them to the same Israeli desert.
Jules Epstein, a man whose drive, avidity, and outsized personality have, for sixty-eight years, been a force to be reckoned with, is undergoing a metamorphosis. In the wake of his parents´ deaths, his divorce from his wife of more than thirty years, and his retirement from the New York legal firm where he was a partner, he´s felt an irresistible need to give away his possessions, alarming his children and perplexing the executor of his estate. With the last of his wealth, he travels to Israel, with a nebulous plan to do something to honor his parents. In Tel Aviv, he is sidetracked by a charismatic American rabbi planning a reunion for the descendants of King David who insists that Epstein is part of that storied dynastic line. He also meets the rabbi´s beautiful daughter who convinces Epstein to become involved in her own project--a film about the life of David being shot in the desert--with life-changing consequences.
But Epstein isn´t the only seeker embarking on a metaphysical journey that dissolves his sense of self, place, and history. Leaving her family in Brooklyn, a young, well-known novelist arrives at the Tel Aviv Hilton where she has stayed every year since birth. Troubled by writer´s block and a failing marriage, she hopes that the hotel can unlock a dimension of reality--and her own perception of life--that has been closed off to her. But when she meets a retired literature professor who proposes a project she can´t turn down, she´s drawn into a mystery that alters her life in ways she could never have imagined.
Bursting with life and humor, Forest Dark