From the best-selling author of Pulitzer finalist What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Dinner at the Centre of the Earth is a spellbinding thriller, a spy novel and a love story, showcasing Englander’s gifts as never before.
Prisoner Z, held at a black site in the Negev desert for a dozen years has only his guard for company. How does a nice American Jewish boy from Long Island wind up an Israeli spy working for Mossad, and later, a traitor to his adopted country? What does it mean to be loyal, what does it mean to be a traitor, when the ideals you cherish are betrayed by the country you love?
From Israel and Gaza to Paris, Italy, and America, the story shifts back in time, providing a kaleidoscopic glimpse of Prisoner Z’s improbable journey to his desert cell.
Englander’s irresistible hero brings wit and heartbreak to his predicament and the plight of a damaged and riven nation.
Taut, provocative, and impossible to put down, a novel of full of shifting surfaces, where nothing and no one is what it seems, Dinner at the Centre of the Earth is the most electrifying work of Nathan Englander’s extraordinary career.
Read by Mark Bramhall
(p) 2017 Penguin Random House
Prisoner Z, held at a black site in the Negev desert for a dozen years has only his guard for company. How does a nice American Jewish boy from Long Island wind up an Israeli spy working for Mossad, and later, a traitor to his adopted country? What does it mean to be loyal, what does it mean to be a traitor, when the ideals you cherish are betrayed by the country you love?
From Israel and Gaza to Paris, Italy, and America, the story shifts back in time, providing a kaleidoscopic glimpse of Prisoner Z’s improbable journey to his desert cell.
Englander’s irresistible hero brings wit and heartbreak to his predicament and the plight of a damaged and riven nation.
Taut, provocative, and impossible to put down, a novel of full of shifting surfaces, where nothing and no one is what it seems, Dinner at the Centre of the Earth is the most electrifying work of Nathan Englander’s extraordinary career.
Read by Mark Bramhall
(p) 2017 Penguin Random House
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Reviews
Nathan Englander's latest is, as usual, superb: a work of psychological precision and moral force, with an immediacy that captures both timeless human truth as well as the perplexities of the present day
In Englander's hands, storytelling is a transformative act. Put him alongside Singer, Carver, and Munro. Englander is, quite simply, one of the very best we have
Englander tells the tangled truth of life in prose that, as ever, surprises the reader with its gnarled beauty
Nathan Englander's fiction [is] always animated by a deep, vibrant core of historical resonance
The depth of Englander's feeling is the thing that separates him from just about everyone. You can hear his heart thumping feverishly on every page
Nathan Englander is one of those rare writers who, like Faulkner, manages to make his seemingly obsessive, insular concerns all the more universal for their specificity
Z can do nothing but think of the past and where her life went wrong, revealed to the reader in a series of often gripping flashbacks
I love that fiction such as this can make you experience so intensely those great subjects with which your real-life familiarity is so very slight
In these shoots of individual compassion lie the reason Englander always wanted to write this book, and the reason you might wish to read it: hope.
Political thriller, absurdist farce, globetrotting romance: multiple forms jostle in a beautifully written take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
full of variety, vitality and passionate prose