Steeped in desire and curiosity, Amos Oz’s Judas is both a tragi-comic coming-of-age tale and a radical rethinking of the concept of treason. Translated by Nicholas de Lange.

Jerusalem, 1959. Shmuel Ash, a biblical scholar, is adrift in his young life when he finds work as a caregiver for a brilliant but cantankerous old man named Gershom Wald. There is, however, a third, mysterious presence in his new home. Atalia Abarbanel, the daughter of a deceased Zionist leader, a beautiful woman in her forties, entrances young Shmuel even as she keeps him at a distance. Piece by piece, the old Jerusalem stone house, haunted by tragic history and now home to the three misfits and their intricate relationship, reveals its secrets. As he starts to uncover the house’s tangled history, he reaches an understanding that harks back not only to the beginning of the Jewish-Arab conflict but also to the beginning of Jerusalem itself - to Christianity, to Judaism, to Judas.

"The book’s prose is meticulous, almost pre-modern. This and the plot’s stillness — days pile up, but many of the novel’s 'events' are Shmuel’s realizations — make reading Judas feel a bit like reading Thomas Bernhard without the misanthropy... Oz pitches the book’s heartbreak and humanism perfectly from first page to last, as befits a writer who understands how vital a political role a novelist can play."  -  Emily Barton, The New York TImes Book Review

Amos Oz is the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, including his brilliant semi-autobiographical work, A Tale of Love and Darkness.  His work has received several international awards, including the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Frankfurt Peace Prize and the 2013 Franz Kafka Prize. He was shortlisted, for his entire body of work, for the Man Booker International Prize 2007.