A woman with three loves and a son with three fathers: this universal story of passion and personal destiny could only have been written by the delightfully inventive author of A Pigeon and a Boy.When the mysterious Judith arrives in a small agricultural village in Palestine in the 1930s, she attracts the attention of three men: Moshe, a widowed farmer; Globerman, a wealthy cattle dealer; and Jacob, who loses his wife--the most beautiful woman in the village--because of his obsession with Judith, who insists on living in a cowshed rather than settling down with any of her admirers. When she gives birth to Zayde, all three suitors consider him their son, and all help father him when Judith dies. Zayde, who narrates the story as an adult, carries a legacy from each man, but it is Jacob, who invites Zayde to a special meal once every decade, who helps him piece together the beguiling story of the singular woman who was his mother. Meir Shalev combines magical...

One of Israel's most celebrated novelists—the acclaimed author of A Pigeon and a Boy—now gives us a story of village love and vengeance in the early days of British Palestine that is still being played out two generations later."In the year 1930, three farmers committed suicide here . . . but contrary to the chronicles of our committee and the conclusions of the British policeman, the people of the moshava knew that only two of the suicides had actually taken their own lives, whereas the third suicide had been murdered." This is the contention of Ruta Tavori, a high school teacher and independent thinker in this small farming community, writing seventy years later about that murder and about two charismatic men she loves and is trying to forgive—her grandfather and her husband—and her son, whom she mourns and misses. In a story rich with the grit, humor, and near-magical evocation of Israeli rural life for which Meir Shalev is beloved by...

From the internationally acclaimed Israeli writer Meir Shalev comes a mesmerizing novel of two love stories, separated by half a century but connected by one enchanting act of devotion.During the 1948 War of Independence--a time when pigeons are still used to deliver battlefield messages--a gifted young pigeon handler is mortally wounded. In the moments before his death, he dispatches one last pigeon. The bird is carrying his extraordinary gift to the girl he has loved since adolescence. Intertwined with this story is the contemporary tale of Yair Mendelsohn, who has his own legacy from the 1948 war. Yair is a tour guide specializing in bird-watching trips who, in middle age, falls in love again with a childhood girlfriend. His growing passion for her, along with a gift from his mother on her deathbed, becomes the key to a life he thought no longer possible. Unforgettable in both its particulars and its sweep, A Pigeon and A Boy is a tale of lovers then...