David Grossman Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Canongate's The Myths Books

David Grossman is a bestselling Israeli author who is the winner of the best Hebrew literature Bialik Prize and the best literary work Sapir Prize.

The author was the son of a father that was a bus driver who had a great love of books and had a small library in his house. Grossman was born in Jerusalem in 1954 and served in military intelligence in the Israel Defense Forces.
He would, later on, attend Hebrew University where he studied theater and philosophy. He had become interested in radio when he was 10 and used to be a correspondent for youth broadcasts.

In university, he continued developing his radio career and ultimately worked as an anchor for the national broadcasting service.

Still, David is best known for the tens of works he has written which have been translated into more than 30 languages and garnered much critical acclaim.

In 2001, he won the most prestigious literary prize in Israel in the Sapir Prize. He is also the winner of the Tel Aviv municipality-administered Bialik Prize for Literature in 2004.

He won the Emet Prize in 2007 in recognition of his professional and academic achievements.

When David Grossman was eight years old, his father brought home a Sholem Aleichem story. He is an author that is best known for writing about the lives of Jews living in small villages and towns called shtetls in Poland, Russia, and Galicia.

He remembers being the only kid in the neighborhood who often read the little stories by Aleichem. This often caused him some embarrassment as it was at the time uncool to look into the diaspora history of Israel.

At the time, Israel was a brand new nation surrounded by enemies but with a very strong military. As such, memories of humiliation and weakness were not that popular.

However, it was from these stories that he created an enclave from which he understood Jewish history in the middle of a very different reality in Jerusalem.

His parents were surprised at how immersed he was in the Aleichem stories, even though there was also a lot of pride too.

When his father noticed how much he was affected by the stories, he started sharing his own experiences about childhood and young adulthood. These would inform much of David Grossman’s later writings.

Apart from Shalom Aleichem, David Grossman has also been influenced and inspired by other authors. Some of the authors that have been a huge inspiration include Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, and Amos Oz.

The one book that changed his life has to be Bruno Shulz’s Cinnamon Shops. Once she was done reading it, he discovered that the author had been killed by the Nazis.

It was then that he felt that he needed to write a work that would be full of life and vitality, even if a fraction of Schulz’s life. With some great ambitions, he told his wife that he would be a writer writing novels that would quiver on the bookshelves.
Grossman published “Duel” his debut novel in 1982 and has since then become known for his ability to rub incidents, words, and ideas together and conjure the magic of storytelling.

He is now one of the most preeminent thinkers and novelists in Israel who has written everything from children’s literature to fiction and nonfiction.

Several of his works have been translated into more than two dozen languages and he has also won the Man Booker Prize.

David Grossman’s novel “A Horse Walks into a Bar” is set in a small city in Israel where a washed-out comedian named Dov Greenstein is working a small crowd.

Among the small audience is Avishai Lazar, a district court judge who Dov knew in his childhood. They all knew him as a scrawny and awkward boy that often went on all fours to confound the bullies in the neighborhood.
Gradually, as his routine teeters between hysteria and hilarity, he starts telling something of a memoir that takes his readers back to his childhood.

He tells a story of childhood terrors where he introduces his mother, a beautiful woman who survived the Holocaust but needs to be constantly monitored. His father is a strict striver and punishing man who does not understand his creative son.
He also tells of his week in military cam where he had an experience that would inform his life from then on. As he tells his story, Lazar the court justice wrestles with the part he played in the story of survival and loss.
Diving deep into how people deal with the battering from life and how this may trigger creative passions, Grossman pens a stunning and memorable work.

David Grossman’s novel “Someone to Run With” is plausible even if not very original story that is one of the author’s masterpieces.

The story highlights typical adolescent themes such as feeling marginalized, abandoned, drugs, and having the desire to be marginalized.

The lead is Assaf, a somewhat childish and tender teenager who has some secret hobbies and finds it difficult to express his emotions.

Alongside Assaf is a mysterious and closed-off teenager named Tamar who has rejected the world and has few human relationships.

On the other hand is Shay, a girl who has found extreme negation using drugs around which she develops a strange complex of behavior.

It makes for a very difficult story as the three characters interact. Nonetheless, Grossman is an excellent storyteller as he investigates and showcases the difficult themes and explores the blind hope of his characters.

David Grossman’s work “To the End of the Land” is the story of an Israeli mother in her forties named Ora.
She was just about to welcome back her son from military service when he is called up to go join a major offensive on the front.

In a feat of magical thinking and preemptive grief, she sets out to Galillee for a hike and does not tell anyone where she has gone.

She has recently separated from Ilan her husband and on this hike, she takes along Avram her former lover and the family’s former best friend. The man was for a time a brilliant artistic spirit who was in the army with her husband in their early twenties.
Their lives had forever changed when they drew lots to determine which of them would get a few days’ leave on offer from the military brass.

Unfortunately, Avram lost and was sent to fight the Yom Kippur War in Egypt where he had to suffer brutal torture as a prisoner of war. When he came back he had become a virtual hermit until he got the offer of going on a spiritual hike with Ora.