Four Meals

“Four Meals” is the extraordinary story of Zayde, his enigmatic mother Judith and her three lovers. When Judith arrives in a small, rural village in Palestine in the early 1930s, three men compete for her attention: Globerman, the cunning, coarse cattle-dealer who loves women, money and flesh; Jacob, owner of hundreds of canaries and host to the four meals which lend the book its narrative structure; and Moshe, a widowed farmer obsessed with his dead wife and his lost braid of hair which his mother cut off in childhood. During the four meals, which take place intermittently over several decades, Zayde slowly comes to understand why these three men consider him their son and why all three participate in raising him.

Reviews of Four Meals

* Shalev's novel, plump with incident and character, is structured around the four meals that Jacob, a candidate father, prepares for Zayde, but in between Shalev brings on side dishes of interlocking stories that keep the reader sated. Guardian * This is a literary novel that succeeds in being neither incomprehensible nor humourless. The author writes with a light touch and an eye for amusing quirks of character. The Historical Novels Review * This delicious novel … has been wonderfully translated. — Penny Perrick The Times * It's as though the Song of Solomon had been rewritten by Gabriel Garcia Marquez … a master class in the storyteller's art. Daily Telegraph