A journey to the end of the millennium

When Ben Attar, the Jewish merchant and tragic hero of A. B. Yehoshua's new novel, takes a second wife, he commits an act whose unforeseen consequences will forever change the course of his life. Yehoshua, in his masterful novels, has always mined the human psyche and the complex ties that bind people together. But here, in his most ambitious novel to date, he seeks to explore the place where desire and morality meet. And by setting his story in the Middle Ages, in the year 999, Yehoshua has found the perfect backdrop against which to explore the most basic questions of human conduct, and how the formation of religious code emanates from the flesh as much as from the heart and mind.