The Smile Of The Lamb

Reviews / Votes

An extraordinary achievement...moving, many-layered, powerful, yet written with beautiful delicacy of touch, is a work of redemption... Combining the compassionate wisdom of the moralist with a true artist's creative imagination, this book deserves the widest possible audience * Indepdendent * Bold, grand, mad, an astonishing meditation on art, religion, love, politics and war, despatched in language which is funny, ferocious and enraptured * Observer * A courageous novel, the first attempt by an Israeli author of the post-1967 generation to come to terms with the consequences of the Occupation, to articulate how 'the conqueror is also the conquered, and injustice has teeth in its tail' * Guardian * Extreme, enormous, almost embarrassingly good, a first novel whose very last page somehow fuses together the political and spiritual currents running through modern day Israel * Time Out * At once sensitive, humane, elegiac and devoid of optimism, save a vague faith in love * Sunday Times * Masterful irony and passion... the sustained poetic intensity of many passages is impressive * Evening Standard * From its very first pages one is aware of Grossman's potential range and originality...Khilmi, an Arab storyteller, is the novel's great imaginative narrative achievement... What a rare pleasure to read a novel in which the novelist's narrative and ideas are so gripping, they are worth arguing about! Here we have authentic talent * Washington Post * Grossman has made a habit of peeling away the camouflage that obfuscates Israel's more painful wounds * Independent * His fiction is earnest, sympathetic, human and highly readable * Irish Times *