Zeruya Shalev is one of Israel's bestselling and most highly acclaimed authors. Her novels, which have been translated into many languages, have sold more than a million copies in Germany, and have garnered major European literary prizes. Now, for the first time, readers can enjoy her captivating novel, Thera, in English.
Thera is the story of Ella Miller, a 36-year-old archaeologist studying one of the largest volcanic blasts in history, the famous Thera eruption. She develops a novel theory that the devastating blast sparked the biblical ten plagues, which led to the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt.
Like her research subject, Ella's life is undergoing tectonic shifts. Her marriage to her former mentor, the needy and brutish Amnon, has come to an end. Her relationships with her intellectually towering father and his servile wife are unbearable. Her young son, Gili, swings wildly from adaptability to despair. Her new lover must face up to his own recently destroyed marriage. Ella seeks to build a new kingdom atop the ruins of the old, but murmurings beneath the family edifice create fault lines that threaten to destabilize her future. Thera presents a dazzling depiction of family life. In sharp, unerring prose, it excavates the archaeology of the human soul.
Read the Tablet review
About the Author
Zeruya Shalev has published four novels, a poetry collection and a children's book. She has been the recipient of the Book Publishers Association's Gold and Platinum Prizes, the Corine Prize, the Amphi Award, the ACUM Prize and the French Wizo Prize. Her novel, Love Life, has been adapted for the screen, and was ranked by the German newspaper Der Spiegel among the 20 best novels of the last 40 years, alongside works by Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Thera is her third novel to appear in English. | |
The Critics Praise:
"Shalev's finest novel to date! How sophisticated and subtle it is -- everything is taken to such heights, such depth, such breadth, and with such precision."
- Amos Oz
"A rare, intense book, [Thera] is Zeruya Shalev's song of triumph written in the tones of a somber elegy...and it has the power of an explosion. A magnificent book...a masterpiece.”
- Le Nouvel Observateur
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