Seven Good Years

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 GOODREADS CHOICE AWARDS 'BEST HUMOUR'A brilliant, hilarious memoir from a master storytellerOver the last seven years, Etgar Keret has had plenty of reasons to worry. His son, Lev, was born during a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. His father became sick. And he has been constantly tormented by nightmarish visions of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, anti-Semitic remarks both real and imagined, and, perhaps most worrisome of all, a dogged telemarketer who seems likely to chase him to the grave. Emerging from these darkly absurd circumstances is a series of funny, touching ruminations on everything from his three-year-old son's impending military service to the terrorist mindset behind Angry Birds.The Seven Good Years is a tender and entertaining tale of a father bringing up his son in a country beset by wars and alarms. Told in Keret's inimitable style, this wise, witty memoir is full of wonder and love, poignant insights, and irrepressible humour. Moving deftly between the personal and the political, the playful and the profound, it reveals the human need to find good in the least likely places, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our capricious world. PRAISE FOR ETGAR KERET'Keret possesses an imagination not easily slotted into conventional literary categories. His short stories might be described as Kafkaesque parables, magic-realist knock-knock jokes or sad kernels of cracked cosmic wisdom.' The New York Times'[Keret's writing] testifies to the power of the surreal, the concise and the fantastic oblique, breezy, seriocomic fantasies that defy encapsulation, categorization and even summary.' The Washington Post