Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Overview

In this thrilling drama from an award-winning author, after one night's deadly mistake, a man will go to any lengths to save his family and his reputation.

Neurosurgeon Eitan Green has the perfect life—married to a beautiful police officer and father of two young boys. Then, speeding along a deserted moonlit road after an exhausting hospital shift, he hits someone. Seeing that the man, an African migrant, is beyond help, he flees the scene.

When the victim's widow knocks at Eitan's door the next day, holding his wallet and divulging that she knows what happened, Eitan discovers that her price for silence is not money. It is something else entirely, something that will shatter Eitan's safe existence and take him into a world of secrets and lies he could never have anticipated.

Waking Lions is a gripping, suspenseful, and morally devastating drama of guilt and survival, shame and desire from a remarkable young author on the rise.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316395410
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	02/27/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	168,963
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen was born in Israel in 1982 and holds an MA in clinical psychology from Tel Aviv University. She has worked for the Israeli civil rights movement, and is an award-winning screenwriter. She won Israel's prestigious Sapir Prize for best debut. Waking Lions, her first novel published in the U.S., has been translated into nine languages.

Editorial Reviews

"Waking Lions offers a commentary on privilege and otherness, challenging readers to confront their own blind spots and preconceptions....Trained as a clinical psychologist, Gundar-Goshen examines her characters with the same formidable gaze. Nobody emerges unscathed....Gundar-Goshen is adept at instilling emotional depth into a thriller plot, delivering the required twists and turns along with an incisive portrayal of her characters' guilt, shame and desire, fluidly shifting between their perspectives....Readers will be rewarded by [Waking Lions'] exhilarating, cinematic finale. Skillfully translated by Sondra Silverston, Waking Lions is a sophisticated and darkly ambitious novel, revealing an aspect of Israeli life rarely seen in its literature."—Ayelet Tsabari, New York Times Book Review

"Vividly imagined, clever, and morally ambiguous....[Waking Lions] is a smart and disturbing exploration of the high price of walking away, whether it be from a car accident or from one's own politically unstable homeland."
—Maureen Corrigan, National Public Radio's "Fresh Air"

"Waking Lions, in a propulsive translation from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, yokes a crime story to thorny ethical issues in ways reminiscent of Donna Tartt and Richard Price...it's a rare book that can trouble your conscience while holding you in a fine state of suspense."
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"If there were a literary prize for nail-biting first lines, Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen's second novel, Waking Lions would win...brave and startling."
—Financial Times UK

"Uncommonly complex, socially aware, and ethically ambiguous....plot is almost secondary to the political implications Gundar-Goshen explores - but what a plot it is, fuel for meditations on integrity and the layered guilt of the Israeli bourgeoisie."
—Boris Kachka, New York "7 Books You Need to Read This February"

"Earth-shattering."—Harper's Bazaar

"An intense moral thriller.... The twists upon twists upon twists in this story...will have readers yelping out loud. Waking Lions seems poised to catch fire."
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"Anyone who loves the magic of the printed word should read Waking Lions....Gundar-Goshen has earned, and deserves, a worldwide audience, and this magnificent novel may well be the vehicle for that."—Joe Hartlaub, Bookreporter

"It pulled me right in. In just 18 words, a spell was cast and broken, and I couldn't wait to go on."


—Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times

"Gripping....twists and turns like a thriller."
—Sunday Times UK

"It is a literary achievement for its page-turning exploration of inconvenient empathy and culpability. Gundar-Goshen's descriptions of pain and medicine are tender and startling, but perhaps the novel's greatest strength is the way it considers how we look at each other, the power of our gaze on strangers and on those we love. It's about seeing and being seen, about pride and power. This is a brave novel, socially aware and truly unforgettable."
—Cat Acree, BookPage

"Waking Lions is immensely suspenseful. Ayelet Gundar-Goshen's alarmingly realistic and superbly written novel will leave readers wondering what they might be capable of under duress, and what makes a good person do such an awful thing—and if a marriage can survive such deception. The difficult decisions faced by Eitan, Liat and the Eritrean community are haunting."
—Jessica Howard, Shelf Awareness (starred review)

"Ayelet Gundar-Goshen's novel, Waking Lions, is more than your guilty-pleasure thriller - although its twists and turns will keep you in suspense until the last page."
—E. Ce Miller, Bustle

"It's not every day a writer like this comes our way."
—Guardian UK

"A moment's inattention upends multiple lives in Gundar-Goshen's powerful thriller....The psychological complications match the plot ones and will please Ruth Rendell fans."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"....a work of great subtlety which wrenches at the heart of both the family and the state, and makes for compulsive reading.... [A] sophisticated, angst-filled thriller."
—Brian Martin, Spectator UK

"Mesmerizing....Smoothly alternating points of view, it uses the format of a thriller to study the almost unbridgeable gap between insider and outsider. The complex relationships between Israelis, Bedouin Arabs, and Eritreans may be unique to Israel, but that social dynamic will reverberate meaningfully with U.S. readers as well."

—Booklist (starred review)

"Extraordinarily assured. Its themes are daring....Waking Lions is a startlingly achieved novel, with all the page-turning appeal of a fine-honed thriller. Gundar-Goshen gives voice to the refugee population that haunts the margins of Israeli society, probing the very hardest of the hard questions, both universal and specific to Israel, with the finesse of the brain surgeon and the wisdom of the philosopher, both of whom know only too well that there are no easy answers."
—Natasha Lehrer, Jewish Quarterly

"Waking Lions is a classy, suspenseful tale of survival where the good guys and the bad guys are harder to distinguish than you might think."
—The Times UK

"Waking Lions has the type of seductive plot twists-a hit-and-run, a blackmailing scheme, a crime that threatens to rend a marriage-that, seemingly, only a fiction writer could concoct. But in fact, the 34-year-old writer, who lives in Israel, borrowed much of the premise of the story from real life."
—Daniel Lefferts, Publishers Weekly "Writers to Watch Spring 2017"

"A literary thriller that is used as a vehicle to explore big moral issues. I loved everything about it."
—Daily Mail UK

"It is a literary achievement for its page-turning exploration of inconvenient empathy and culpability. Gundar-Goshen's descriptions of pain and medicine are tender and startling, but perhaps the novel's greatest strength is the way it considers how we look at each other, the power of our gaze on strangers and on those we love. It's about seeing and being seen, about pride and power. This is a brave novel, socially aware and truly unforgettable."
—Cat Acree, BookPage

"Gundar-Goshen transcends the genre of thriller...Waking Lions is a work of exquisite literary craft, a book that penetrates to the heart and soul of its characters."—Jonathan Kirsch, Jewish Journal

"Why should Jewish immigrants enjoy immediate citizenship in Israel, while African immigrants are detained or deported? Of course, these problems are not unique to Israel. Exactly the same arguments over immigration, on a much larger scale, are dominating the politics of Europe and the United States. It is surely for this reason that Waking Lions, the new psychological thriller by Israeli novelist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, has broken out to become a worldwide phenomenon."—Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine

"An auspicious entry on the English-language scene for Israeli author Gundar-Goshen."
—David Keymer, Library Journal

"[A] suspenseful morality tale."
—Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star

"In Waking Lions, the bad guys are the good guys, the victims are the perpetrators, and the ending is definitely not what you'll expect."
—E. Ce Miller, Bustle "15 Books With Plot Twists You Never Saw Coming"

From the Publisher

Gundar-Goshen has said that she believes the writer's job is to force readers to look at what they'd usually avoid. Not short on discomfiting scenes, Waking Lions offers a commentary on privilege and otherness, challenging readers to confront their own blind spots and preconceptions. The themes of visibility and invisibility, of the power dynamics between the observed and the observer, run throughout the narrative…The authority [Sirkit] holds over [Eitan] both infuriates and intrigues him. The intimacy that emerges between them is rendered with a restrained intensity that creates some of the novel's most dramatic scenes…Gundar-Goshen is adept at instilling emotional depth into a thriller plot, delivering the required twists and turns along with an incisive portrayal of her characters' guilt, shame and desire, fluidly shifting between their perspectives…Skillfully translated by Sondra Silverston, Waking Lions is a sophisticated and darkly ambitious novel, revealing an aspect of Israeli life rarely seen in its literature.

The New York Times Book Review - Ayelet Tsabari

★ 12/19/2016
A moment’s inattention upends multiple lives in Gundar-Goshen’s powerful thriller, the Israeli author’s first novel to be published in the U.S. When Dr. Eitan Green uncovered corruption at the hospital he worked at in Tel Aviv, he was forced to take a less desirable position in Beersheba in the Negev desert. Now, after a too-long shift at Beersheba’s Soroka Hospital, an exhausted Eitan glances at the Moon in his rearview window during his drive home. While his eyes are off the road, he strikes an Eritrean man, who suffers a skull fracture. Unable to do anything to save the man’s life, the guilt-ridden Eitan flees. His nightmare worsens when the victim’s wife appears at his home, bearing the wallet he dropped at the scene of the hit-and-run. He agrees to give her fellow Eritreans medical treatment at night in exchange for her keeping silent about his role in her husband’s death. The arrangement forces Eitan to lie to his police detective wife, who has been looking into the fatality. The psychological complications match the plot ones and will please Ruth Rendell fans. Agent: Grainne Fox, Fletcher & Company. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Waking Lions is a gripping, suspenseful and morally devastating drama of guilt and survival, shame and desire.

Newsweek

11/01/2017
Winner of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize for 2017, this combination of psychological thriller, crime novel, and morality play revolves around Dr. Eitan Green, a respected neurosurgeon who has been exiled to the remote southern town of Beersheva. After working a long shift, he takes his SUV off-roading in the desert and accidentally hits and kills an Eritrean refugee. Eitan flees the scene, but the victim's wife discovers his wallet and blackmails him into establishing an underground clinic to treat undocumented immigrants from Africa. NBC bought the rights to adapt the novel into a TV series but will change the setting to Beverly Hills, CA. Gundar-Goshen's debut novel, One Night, Markovitch, which won Israel's prestigious Sapir Prize for debut fiction in 2012, was translated into English by Sondra Silverston but so far has only been published in the UK. (Xpress Reviews, 2/10/17)

Library Journal

Deep-voiced Paul Boehmer narrates this police procedural set in Be’er Sheva, the brittle Israeli desert. After Dr. Eitan Green hits and kills an Eritrean man with his car in the middle of the night, he is blackmailed into providing medical treatments to Eritrean refugees. At the same time, Green’s wife, a detective, is investigating the hit-and-run. Boehmer’s reading echoes the emotional drama of a guilty conscience. He delivers both thoughts and dialogue with barely discernable Israeli and African accents. This mystery forces listeners to pay attention to extensive details of the murder investigation, graphically described medical procedures, and internal ruminations of the main characters. Boehmer works hard to dramatize the horror of lies, secrets, and the ramifications of one careless act. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

MAY 2017 - AudioFile

Deep-voiced Paul Boehmer narrates this police procedural set in Be’er Sheva, the brittle Israeli desert. After Dr. Eitan Green hits and kills an Eritrean man with his car in the middle of the night, he is blackmailed into providing medical treatments to Eritrean refugees. At the same time, Green’s wife, a detective, is investigating the hit-and-run. Boehmer’s reading echoes the emotional drama of a guilty conscience. He delivers both thoughts and dialogue with barely discernable Israeli and African accents. This mystery forces listeners to pay attention to extensive details of the murder investigation, graphically described medical procedures, and internal ruminations of the main characters. Boehmer works hard to dramatize the horror of lies, secrets, and the ramifications of one careless act. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

MAY 2017 - AudioFile

★ 2016-12-06
In this intense moral thriller, an Israeli doctor conceals a fatal hit-and-run, is blackmailed by his victim's widow into operating an underground clinic for refugees, and sees everything he ever believed about himself crumble to bits. Neurosurgeon Eitan Green has just gotten out from a very late night at the ER. He is burning off steam on a deserted road in his SUV, bellowing along with Janis Joplin, "thinking that the moon was the most beautiful he had ever seen when he hit[s] the man." From the moment we meet him, Eitan's bad luck will become tangled in his good intentions, his poor choices with his righteous ones, his appeal with his weakness. The very vehicle in which he had the accident was a consolation prize to make up for having to move from Tel Aviv to dusty Beersheba: he was transferred when he uncovered corruption at his hospital. So he's quite an ethical guy, as murderers go, and a devoted husband and father, too. Further complicating the situation and spinning off additional consequences, his wife is the police detective assigned to investigate the hit-and-run accident. By then Eitan has already learned that his getaway was not as clean as he had hoped: the day after the accident, a beautiful Eritrean woman shows up at his door with his wallet, dropped at the scene—and a demand. "During the day, you can do whatever you want…but you will keep your nights free." Free to provide medical care to an endless stream of illegal immigrants whom he will treat in secret in a garage. That is just the first of the twists upon twists upon twists in this story—more than one of which will have readers yelping out loud. Gundar-Goshen's U.S. debut seems poised to catch fire, with the multiple narrative perspectives and dizzying reversals that connoisseurs of this genre adore.

Kirkus Reviews