Take Up and Read: A Novel (The Lost Detective Trilogy #3) (Paperback)

Take Up and Read: A Novel (The Lost Detective Trilogy #3) By Shimon Adaf, Yardenne Greenspan (Translated by) Cover Image

Take Up and Read: A Novel (The Lost Detective Trilogy #3) (Paperback)

By Shimon Adaf, Yardenne Greenspan (Translated by)

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Other Books in Series

This is book number 3 in the The Lost Detective Trilogy series.

"In Shimon Adaf's Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured." —Lavie Tidhar, author of By Force Alone

In the summer of 2014, at the height of the Gaza-Israel conflict, Elish Ben-Zaken met the poet and librarian Nahum Farkash in the border town of Sderot. They spoke only briefly, but in that brief encounter, Elish might have missed the key to unraveling the case of a Sderot woman who disappeared for two days, only to reappear with no memory of her time away.

In Take Up and Read, Shimon Adaf returns to Farkash’s story. Attempting to defend the legacy of the singer Dalia Shoshan—whose murder Elish investigated several years before—Farkash tries to impede the production of a new documentary about her life. Meanwhile, he reminisces about his past, reflecting on his experiences as a young religious boy growing up in Sderot.

Fourteen years later, in a militant Israel that has been distorted by catastrophic war, Elish’s niece and nephew are haunted by their uncle’s death and the failure of his 2014 investigation. As Tahel and Oshri conduct experiments in search of the truth, they draw near to the heart of a great conspiracy.

In this masterful conclusion to the Lost Detective Trilogy, Shimon Adaf brings together futuristic biotechnology, parallel universes, and Jewish mysticism. Take Up and Read addresses a central concern of the trilogy, interrogating humankind’s tenuous grasp on the boundaries of our selves, and the arbitrary connections between the body, consciousness, and perception.

Shimon Adaf was born in Sderot, Israel, and now lives in Jaffa. A poet, novelist, and musician, Adaf worked for several years as a literary editor at Keter Publishing House and has also been a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa. He leads the creative writing program and lectures on Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Adaf received the Yehuda Amichai prize for Hebrew poetry (2010) for the collection Aviva-No; the Sapir Prize (2012) for the novel Mox Nox, the English translation of which, by Philip Simpson, won the Jewish Book Council's 2020 Paper Brigade Award for New Israeli Fiction in Honor of Jane Weitzman; and the I. and B. Newman Prize for Hebrew Literature (2017).

Yardenne Greenspan is a writer and Hebrew translator born in Tel Aviv and based in New York. Her translations have been published by Restless Books, St. Martin’s Press, Akashic, Syracuse University, New Vessel Press, Amazon Crossing, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her translation of Yishai Sarid's novel The Memory Monster was selected as one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020. Yardenne’s writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Haaretz, Guernica, Literary Hub, Blunderbuss, Apogee, The Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, and Words Without Borders, among other publications. She has an MFA from Columbia University and is a regular contributor to Ploughshares.
Product Details ISBN: 9780374277970
ISBN-10: 0374277974
Publisher: Picador
Publication Date: August 2nd, 2022
Pages: 688
Language: English
Series: The Lost Detective Trilogy

"Adaf concludes his epic Lost Detective Trilogy with an extraordinary blend of science fiction, crime, and high fantasy . . . As with the previous installments, Adaf’s rich characterizations are complemented by the clever prose. The result is an instant classic." Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Shimon Adaf is my literary hero, a fearless explorer with the endless curiosity of a child and the skill of an Old Master, combined to unleash strange and wonderful masterpieces on the world. In his Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured." —Lavie Tidhar, author of By Force Alone