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The modern-day Jonah at the center of Joshua Max Feldman's brilliantly conceived retelling of the book of Jonah is a young Manhattan lawyer named Jonah Jacobstein. He's a lucky man: healthy and handsome, with two beautiful women ready to spend the rest of their lives with him and an enormously successful career that gets more promising by the minute.
He's celebrating a deal that will surely make him partner when a bizarre, unexpected biblical vision at a party changes everything. Hard as he tries to forget what he saw, this disturbing sign is only the first of many Jonah will witness, and before long his life is unrecognizable. Though this perhaps divine intervention will be responsible for more than one irreversible loss in Jonah's life, it will also cross his path with that of Judith Bulbrook, an intense, breathtakingly intelligent woman who's no stranger to loss herself.
As this funny and bold novel moves to Amsterdam and then Las Vegas, Feldman examines the way we live now while asking an age-old question: How do you know if you're chosen?
"[An] enticing debut novel." - Publishers Weekly
"Feldman is clever in his use of the Jonah story, and his novel is of the same strange and enigmatic quality as the original." - Kirkus
"It is rare that a novel juxtaposes the contemporary world and the biblical one in such dramatic fashion, The Book of Jonah is a compelling read, a clever deconstruction of modern life as reflected in an ancient and timeless lens." - Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone
"This engaging novel gives form to an opaque and ancient story while retaining that story's mystery." - Zachary Mason, author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey
"Joshua Feldman offers a shrewd, humorous, and entertainingly modern twist on the Old Testament prophet. He's written a bold and very funny book." - Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of National Book Award finalist Madeleine is Sleeping
This information about The Book of Jonah was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Joshua Max Feldman is a writer of fiction and plays. Born and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts, he graduated from Columbia University and currently lives in south Florida. The Book of Jonah is his first novel.
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