WORLD SHADOW first publication outside of Israel will be in SPANISH BY AlfAGUARA on the 26/3/2015. In Israel the novel spent 4 months in the Best Seller list, including number 1, sold 20,000 copies, chosen as the book of the year by TIME-OUT magazine and Maariv newspaper, received raving reviews and was in the list of the Sapir prize.

World Shadow is in the list for the Sapir Prize 2014. The Sapir Prize for Literature of Israel is the most important annual literary award presented for a work of fine literature. This is Nir Barams third nomination for his last three novels. His last two was also shortlisted.

Hanoch Marmari the former editor of Haaretz in an article about World Shadow in’The Seventh Eye Journal’ : “A literary miracle, a novel that builds a glorious floor above the capitalist mall inside which we all lost our way. Amongst other subjects Nir Baram’s novel World Shadow deals with a group of anarchists that manage to corrupt, through a series of sloppy events, art works in museums and to capture for one moment the attention of millions.”

to read the whole review in the The Seventh Eye Journal click read more

So Far the rights to “World Shadow” were sold to the following publishing houses:
Text publishing (English rights). Hanser (Germany). Alfaguara (Spain). De Bezige Bij (Netherlands and Belgium). Gyldendal (Denmark). Fraktura (Croatia). Gyldendal (Norway).

An interview in English about “World Shadow” in the culture program of I24 news.

Starting at 6.45 minute

“World Shadow is a novel that will fire-up people everywhere it’ll be published, especially young people.
Only rarely can you read such a novel that is sophisticated, full of energy, imagination, innovation, rage and humor. More than anything: World Shadow changes the way you see the world. It is very possible that in a few years World Shadow will become a novel that young people  all over the world qoute.”

(author A.B Yehoshua)

Dror Mishani the author of the international best seller, award winning “The Missing File” in an evening about “World Shadow”.

World Shadow is a marvelous and revolutionary novel that in its greatest moments refuses to accept the world as it is and as we “already” know it – but rather starts to read as a text on the verge of what the world is ‘no longer’ but ‘could be’ and ‘might some day be’.

This dimension which is beyond “knowing the world” opens up in the novel mainly due to the process of repentance that its two main characters go through.

Gabriel Mantsur from Jerusalem changes during the novel, so much so that in the end of the novel he is no longer the same man; he drifts away from the business world and the financial world due to his decline in them but also because he undergoes a deep transformation, so deep that in the end he supports the strike.

Like Gabriel, Daniel Kay also undergoes an ideological transformation which brings him not only to betray his ex-co workers at MSV but to even join the strikers.

Through Daniel Kay, Gabriel Mantzur and the group of young strikers – the world as we know it is on the verge of repentance and comes closer to a real change. The truly fascinating things is that this also happened in Baram’s novel Good People – so much so that even in that historical novel Baram created the feeling that if the two main characters dare just a bit more they’ll be able to minimize the disastrous effects of the war that already happened.

In World Shadow this feeling is even stronger because while reading this seemingly realistic novel, a novel that knows the world better than any other Israeli novel, you feel that turning the page will make the world different.

In its liberating moments World Shadow is not written in the present tense of “knowing the world”, also not in future tense (utopian time), but rather in a unique tense that lays between a familiar present and a yet unknown future. A tense or a time that could be named “the time which is forming now” (a line from World Shadow, page 402). And this tense continuously asks the readers: which time do you want it to be?

To the full lecture –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_olsPleHG0

Read More...

3 months after publication – World Shadow by Nir Baram hits No. 1 on the Best-Seller lists. This goes to show the immense effect and the enthusiastic reactions this novel has in Israel.

(Ha’aretz, 13.11.2013)

06/10/2013 – The Israeli Left’s last novel by Noam Sheizaf – A new best-selling novel by Nir Baram takes aim at the Israeli ‘peace industry,’ globalization and the sense of betrayal a generation of left wing and progressive operatives is leaving behind.

“A real literary achievement. Surely one of the most impressive novels that were written in Hebrew in the past years. It is a mind-blowing epos that raises big questions about the human spirit, democracy, morals and violence.” 15/08/2013

(Ha’aretz Culture Supplement)

To read the whloe interview in English, please click ‘read more’

“The book of the year”

(TimeOut Tel-Aviv selection)