Some Day - by Shemi Zarhin (Paperback)

About the Book

Gripping family saga, filled with sex and cooking, some readers have called it the Israeli One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Book Synopsis

On the shores of Israel's Sea of Galilee lies the city of Tiberias, a place bursting with sexuality and longing for love. The air is saturated with smells of cooking and passion. Young Shlomi, who develops a remarkable culinary talent, has fallen for Ella, the strange neighbor with suicidal tendencies; his little brother Hilik obsessively collects words in a notebook. In the wild, selfish but magical grown-up world that swirls around them, a mother with a poet's soul mourns the deaths of literary giants while her handsome husband cheats on her both at home and abroad. Some Day is a gripping family saga. Shemi Zarhin's hypnotic writing renders a painfully delicious vision of individual lives behind Israel's larger national story.

Review Quotes

Words without Borders Best Books and World Literature Today Best Books.

"Ardent, salty, whimsical, steamy, absurd . . . A wallop to the reader."
-Ploughshares

"Since I was little, I have thrilled at reading food-related passages in novels. But the food scenes in Some Day by Israeli novelist Shemi Zarhin are on another level. In one passage, Zarhin describes a dish so vividly I felt compelled to re-create it in my own kitchen ... My mouth watered."
-Leah Koenig in Modern Jewish Cooking

"Extremely moving."
-Miami Sun Sentinel

"Zarhin has added his name to the luminaries of Israeli literature."
-The Arts Fuse

"This thrilling, fresh, and surprising novel ought to draw the eyes of the literati back to Israel."
-ForeWord Reviews

"Masterful . . . haunting . . . sublime . . . Zarhin's characters are so real they fairly jump off the page."
-The Jerusalem Post

A surreal story of twisted fates, with food in Israel saturating every page. Compelling and haunting, there is an addictive bitterness to Shemi Zarhin's writing."
-Joan Nathan, author of The Foods of Israel Today and Jewish Cooking in America

A fantastical-realist universe in which ... cuisine, which greases the wheels of the plot and connects people, is just as key a protagonist as the other characters in the book."
-Haaretz

"Beautiful ... reading the book feels like going back in time."
-Yael Stone, actor in Orange is the New Black

About the Author

Shemi Zarhin is a novelist, film director and screenwriter who has created some of the most critically-acclaimed and award-winning films in contemporary Israeli cinema. Some Day is his first novel and was a best-seller in Israel.

Yardenne Greenspan is a fiction writer and translator and holds an MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University. A recipient of the American Literary Translators Association Fellowship, her translation projects include works by Israeli authors Rana Werbin and Yaakov Shabtai.