Melisande! What Are Dreams? | Granta

  • Published: 04/04/2013
  • ISBN: 9781847085009
  • 129x20mm
  • 224 pages

Melisande! What Are Dreams?

Hillel Halkin

An inspiring novel; a philosophical love story; a moving ode to a woman, as joyful and celebratory as it is elegiac. The narrator is a man in his forties, a scholar of ancient Greek philosophy known as Hoo. He has been given the nickname by Mellie, the woman he addresses in this book while exploring his memories of their years together and apart. The two of them have known each other since high school in New York in the 1950s – and perhaps, Hoo thinks, much longer than that. Only as the novel unfolds do his reasons for writing to her, and the full nature of their relationship, become clear.

An outstanding novel... a meditation about the nature of love and the power of old wishes and dreams... wry, intelligent and elegiac

Kate Saunders, The Times

Lovely, erudite, romantic and careful. The vagabond, the scholar and the woman are echoing and reflecting in my mind still, poetic, subtle and passionate about the things that have always mattered. This is a long drink of cool water to anyone who likes an intelligent novel

Louisa Young, author, My Dear I Wanted To Tell You

Pitch perfect - filled with quiet wisdom, and laced with nostalgia yet never cloying

Financial Times

The Author

Hillel Halkin is a writer, critic, and well-known translator whose journalism and essays from Israel have regularly appeared in publications like Commentary and The New Republic for over thirty years. His first book, Letters To An American Jewish Friend, the recipient of a National Jewish Book Award, caused spirited controversy. His much-acclaimed Across The Sabbath River: In Search Of A Lost Tribe of Israel, received the 2002 Lucy Dawidowicz Prize for the writing of history. A Strange Death: a story discovered in Palestine was published by Public Affairs (US) and Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK) in 2005, and AB Yehoshua called it ‘ a personal adventure into the past whose skilled, gripping prose moves back and forth between the documentary and the imaginative…An artful treatment of history worthy of the highest praise.’

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