Take Up and Read

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. The two men 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 three 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 Shushan—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 Elish Ben-Zaken trilogy, Shimon Adaf brings together futuristic biotechnology, parallel universes, and Jewish mysticism, and the extent of his renovation of the detective novel comes finally and fully into view. 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.