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In a country that reveres its great writers, Israeli novelist David Grossman stands out. He is often referred to as “the conscience of the country.” The World’s Matthew Bell met with Grossman at his home outside of Jerusalem to talk about his latest novel, “To the End of the Land.” The book tells the story of a woman terrified of losing her son in the army. Grossman’s own son was killed while in the military. Download MP3

AUDIO EXTRA: Listen to an extended interview with David Grossman

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Roberta Silman’s review of “To the End of the Land”

Once in a while we get an inkling of what it must have been like to open the pages of such novels as Anna Karenina, Great Expectations, The Sound and The Fury, The Great Gatsby, To The Lighthouse, or The Slave when they were first published, before any reviews or critical essays were written about them. We understand what it must have been like to feel the greatness of the prose almost viscerally and to know that with the reading our angle of vision has changed forever.

That is how I felt when I finished David Grossman’s new novel, To The End of the Land, translated superbly by Jessica Cohen. It surpasses anything he has written before, and, for me it surpasses anything I have read in decades. For here is a novel that makes you feel as if you are living it as you read – something not quite possible in masterpieces of quite a different order, such as A Hundred Years of Solitude, or works by Borges or Cortazar or Calvino. Or even in Ulysses, which is so heavily buttressed by Homer. Read more

• World Books Review: A Masterpiece From Israel
• World Books Review: David Grossman’s Lost Faith
• New Yorker profile, George Packer
• NYTimes review