WINNER OF THE JEWISH QUARTERLY WINGATE PRIZE 10 WOMEN TO WATCH IN 2017–BookPageA New York Times Notable Book of 2017 After one night’s deadly mistake, a man will go to any lengths to save his family and his reputation.Neurosurgeon Eitan Green has the perfect life–married to a beautiful police officer and father of two young boys. Then, speeding along a deserted moonlit road after an exhausting … Then, speeding along a deserted moonlit road after an exhausting hospital shift, he hits someone. Seeing that the man, an African migrant, is beyond help, he flees the scene.
When the victim’s widow knocks at Eitan’s door the next day, holding his wallet and divulging that she knows what happened, Eitan discovers that her price for silence is not money. It is something else entirely, something that will shatter Eitan’s safe existence and take him into a world of secrets and lies he could never have anticipated.
WAKING LIONS is a gripping, suspenseful, and morally devastating drama of guilt and survival, shame and desire from a remarkable young author on the rise.more
I REALLY struggled with this one. For 400 plus pages it just seemed to drift along. It offered me nothing to keep me sitting and turning the pages so I read just a few pages at a time bored beyond belief. Nothing gripped me about the characters or the story line at all which really disappointed me as the initial blurb made it look really good.
Waking Lions is my book group’s choice for this month. If not for that, I wouldn’t have known to pick it up. What a loss that would have been. It’s an amazing book.
If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that my book group has been in existence for more than thirty years, that we pick our books at a dinner each June, and that I like our choices most of the time but not all. Admittedly, some people avoid joining book groups precisely because they don’t want to be forced to read a book they wouldn’t otherwise read. This is definitely one view. Reading time is finite, right? Often, though, I’ve been enriched reading books that I don’t personally choose. Waking Lions is a good example.
Billed as a “literary thriller,” it tells of a young Israeli doctor named Eitan Green, who is the whistle-blower against corruption at the hospital where he works and is rewarded by banishment to a remote hospital in the desert. His wife, a police detective, gets a job in that desert town, and their two young sons struggle to adapt.
Hating the desert and frustrated with his new hospital, Eitan is driving home on a deserted road late one night, pushing his four-wheel-drive to the limit, when he hits a man on the road. Immediately, he stops, but quickly realizes that the man will not survive. Should Eitan stay? Leave? Call the police? Spoiler alert: He leaves. Would you?
This is the first of many moral dilemmas facing not only Eitan, but his detective wife, and the widow of the deceased man, plus others in both the police department and at the hospital.
The author is in her mid-thirties, and I am in awe. Her writing is lyrical without being operatic, colorful in a succinct but powerful way. What most awed me about this book is its plotting. It is crafted in the most intricate way, with so many different threads all meaningful, all woven in.
I read Waking Lions in a single day. Granted it was a Sunday in the middle of a snowstorm. Still, it gripped me.
One of my all time favorite Books !!!
Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, beautifully translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, is a remarkable novel that probes the complexity of our moral choices. People do bad things or good things, for bad reasons or good ones, culminating in earned or unearned outcomes. It is about power shifts, the prejudice between Israelis, Bedouins, and African Eritreans, the refugee experience, the mystery of never really knowing one another, and how the privileged class can turn away from the uncomfortable and live in a sterile world of their own making.
The story is told by an omniscient narrator who knows the thoughts of the characters, without dialogue. Twists create an unexpectedly propulsive, action plot line. It is a memorable novel.