DAVID BEZMOZGIS

The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis: read it in a sitting; remember it for the rest of your life. "This unforgettable novel squanders no words in its brilliant, deft depictions of love, of memory, of compassion and, ultimately, despite its title, of loyalty". (Edith Pearlman). "Taut, fierce, forensically insightful. Compulsive and profound". (A D Miller). "A moral thriller". (Aleksandar Hemon). "Definitively establishes him as one of the foremost writers of his generation". (Ben Fountain). Two men meet on a park bench in Jerusalem: a politician, on the eve of a controversial stand against his government, and a Mossad agent, sent to dissuade him with the threat of blackmail. Neither backs down. Escaping the furore he's unleashed, the politician and his lover head to Crimea and a resort on the Black Sea to lie low. But the fierce battle between political principles and personal loyalties has followed them to this faded Russian backwater, and a shocking encounter awaits them. In its depiction of a man whose principles are tested to the utmost extremes, The Betrayers cuts to the very heart of our troubled times. David Bezmozgis was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973 and emigrated with his parents to Toronto in 1980. His first novel, The Free World, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His collection Natasha and Other Stories was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the Commonwealth Writers' Regional Prize for First Book. In 2010 he was selected as one of the New Yorker's '20 under 40', celebrating the twenty most promising fiction writers under the age of forty. His books have been translated into over a dozen languages.

Meet the Bermans - Bella, Roman and their son Mark - Russian Jews who have fled the Riga of Brezhnev for Toronto, the city of their dreams. Natasha brings the Bermans - and the Russian Jewish enclaves of Toronto - to life in stories full of big, desperate, utterly believable consequence. In 'Tapka', six-year-old Mark's first experiments in English bring ruin and near tragedy to the neighbours upstairs. In 'Roman Berman, Massage Therapist', Roman and Bella stake all their hopes for Roman's business on their first, humiliating dinner with a North American family. In the title story, a stark, funny anatomy of first love, we witness Mark's sexual awakening at the hands of his fourteen-year-old cousin, a new immigrant from the New Russia.

Sus primeras experiencias con la nueva lengua, las nacientes posibilidades de negocio o el brote del sentimiento amoroso y sexual del menor, son algunas de estas historias en las que los Bermans viven el conflicto de la identidad, de la religion y de la cultura y que captan la experiencia del inmigrante con ingenio y hondura.Natasha, ha ganado varios premios literarios como el Commonwealth Prize for Best first Book o el National Magazine Award, ha sido escogida como el Mejor libro del año por el Chicago Tribune o libro imprescindible por el New York Times e incluida en la edicion de Best American Short Stories 2005, ha sido aclamada unanimemente por la critica anglosajona.

These incandescent pages give us one fraught, momentous day in the life of Baruch Kotler, a Soviet Jewish dissident who now finds himself a disgraced Israeli politician. When he refuses to back down from a contrary but principled stand regarding the settlements in the West Bank, his political opponents expose his affair with a mistress decades his junior, and the besieged couple escapes to Yalta, the faded Crimean resort of Kotlers youth. There, shockingly, Kotler encounters the former friend whose denunciation sent him to the Gulag almost forty years earlier. In a whirling twenty-four hours, Kotler must face the ultimate reckoning, both with those who have betrayed him and with those whom he has betrayed, including a teenage daughter, a son facing his own moral dilemma in the Israeli army, and the wife who once campaigned to secure his freedom and stood by him through so much. Stubborn, wry, and self-knowing, Baruch Kotler is one of the great creations of contemporary fiction. An aging man grasping at a final passion, he is drawn inexorably into a crucible that is both personal and biblical in scope. In prose that is elegant, sly, precise, and devastating in its awareness of the human heart, David Bezmozgis has rendered a story for the ages, an inquest into the nature of fate and consequence, love and forgiveness. The Betrayers is a high-wire act, a powerful tale of morality and sacrifice that will haunt readers long after they turn the final page.

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZEAward-winning author David Bezmozgiss first story collection in more than a decade, hailed by the Toronto Star as intelligent, funny, unfailingly sympatheticIn the title story, a father and his young daughter stumble into a bizarre version of his immigrant childhood. A mysterious tech conference brings a writer to Montreal, where he discovers new designs on the past in How It Used to Be. A grandfathers Yiddish letters expose a love affair and a wartime secret in Little Rooster. In Childhood, Marks concern about his sons phobias evokes a shameful incident from his own adolescence. In Romans Song, Romans desire to help a new immigrant brings him into contact with a sordid underworld. At his fathers request, Victor returns to Riga, the city of his birth, where his loyalties are tested by the man he might have been in A New Gravestone for an Old Grave. And, in the noir-inspired The Russian Riviera, Kostya leaves Russia to pursue a boxing career only to find himself working as a doorman in a garish nightclub in the Toronto suburbs. In these deeply felt, slyly humorous stories, Bezmozgis pleads no special causes but presents immigrant characters with all their contradictions and complexities, their earnest and divided hearts.

L’any 1980 la família Berman es trasllada de la Unió Soviètica als suburbis de Toronto, Canadà. Serà Mark Berman qui, com si d’un àlbum familiar es tractés, repassarà les experiències tragicòmiques d

Welcome to Rome. It is the summer of 1978, and the Krasnansky family, bickering, tired and confused, are supposed to be passing through. Alongside thousands of other Soviet Jewish refugees - among them criminals, dissidents and refuseniks - they await passage to their new homes in the West. But escaping Communism is not so easy, especially when some of the Krasnanskys insist on bringing it with them, and even more so when their sponsor in the USA lets them down and they find that theyre no longer passing through at all. On the contrary, theyre stuck.Welcome, then, to the waiting room of your life, and to a tragic yet comic tale of reckless brothers and long-suffering sisters, ailing parents and innocent children, of love affairs and criminal liaisons, of a wonderfully troubled family and a perpetually wandering people, and their epic search for a home: somewhere, anywhere - or Canada, as it turns out.

The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis is a searing novel about a man whose principles are tested to the utmost extremesImpressive . . . alive to how reversals of fortune change individualsSunday TimesIn a small crumbling resort in the Crimea, two men meet after many years apart. Kotler has fled Jerusalem with his young lover after taking a decision which has now cost him everything. Yet the other, Vladimir, would rather discuss the distant past: a long time ago, Kotler was betrayed and imprisoned - and now there must be a reckoning. With the world on his trail, Kotler would like nothing better than to hide. However, the consequences of decisions old and new return to haunt him . . .Gripping from the outset. Brilliant Tom Rob SmithCompelling, rich, comic, profoundFinancial TimesBrave and ambitiousIndependentVery impressive. As gripping as a political thriller, but probes issues of loyalty and betrayal more deeply than most thrillers ever aspire to do James Wood, New Yorker, Books of the YearDavid Bezmozgis was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973 and emigrated with his parents to Toronto in 1980. His first novel, The Free World, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His collection Natasha and Other Stories was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the Commonwealth Writers Regional Prize for First Book. His books have been translated into over a dozen languages.

En 1978 el mundoestaba fracturado por el Telón de Acero, que había convertido en universos prácticamentedesconocidos los países que se encontraban al otro lado de ese muro aparentemente impenetrable. En verano de ese año,una familia de judios rusos, los Krasnansky, aprovechan su oportunidad de atravesar esa barrera y dejar atras el bloquesovietico para viajar a Roma y dar un paso mas hacia America, su destino definitivo. Son tres generaciones de una mismafamilia y sus reacciones y experiencias ante esa nueva realidad son muy dispares. Samuil, el patriarca , es un veteranodel Ejercito Rojo que hasta el ultimo momento se habia resistido a abandonar su patria y observa con recelo ese nuevomundo. Sus hijos y las esposas de estos, sin embargo, adoptan actitudes diferentes. El primogenito, Karl, que tiene doshijos, es un hombre pragmatico que se lanza a aprovechar las oportunidades que se presentan en la capital italiana. Encambio, Alec, el segundo hijo de Samuil, tiene una concepcion mas hedonista de la vida. Recientemente se ha casado conPolina, una bella mujer que se ha arriesgado dejandolo todo atras y que ahora esta abrumada ante ese nuevo eincomprensible escenario. Con un gusto por los detalles y una sensibilidad unica para captar la esencia de las personasy las situaciones, Bezmozgis narra con cariño, nostalgia y una pizca ironia los avatares de una familia que se vesometida a los imperativos politicos de una epoca agitada.