b**WINNER OF THE 2017 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE**/bbrbrbThe award-winning and internationally acclaimed author of the iTo the End of the Land /inow gives us a searing short novel about the life of a stand-up comic, as revealed in the course of one evening s performance. In the dance between comic and audience, with barbs flying back and forth, a deeper story begins to take shape one that will alter the lives of many of those in attendance./bbrbrIn a little dive in a small Israeli city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, is doing a night of stand-up. In the audience is a district court justice, Avishai Lazar, whom Dov knew as a boy, along with a few others who remember Dov as an awkward, scrawny kid who walked on his hands to confound the neighborhood bullies. Gradually, as it teeters between hilarity and hysteria, Dov s patter becomes a kind of memoir, taking us back into the terrors of his childhood: we meet his beautiful flower of a mother, a Holocaust survivor in need of constant monitoring, and his punishing father, a striver who had little understanding of his creative son. Finally, recalling his week at a military camp for youth where Lazar witnessed what would become the central event of Dov s childhood Dov describes the indescribable while Lazar wrestles with his own part in the comedian s story of loss and survival. Continuing his investigations into how people confront life s capricious battering, and how art may blossom from it, Grossman delivers a stunning performance in this memorable one-night engagement (jokes in questionable taste included).