Accidents A Novel

For Shira Klein, Yonatan Luria and his daughter, Dana, it is winterwinter at work, winter among friends, winter at home, and winter of the heart. Yonatan is a marginal writer, a fifty-year-old widower left to raise his child alone. When he meets Shira, a bestselling author paralyzed by stage fright, the thaw begins as man, woman, and girl enter a halting romance, alternately tender and belligerent, generous and withdrawn.

Yael Hedaya has worked as a journalist and columnist for the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, and the Tel Aviv weekly magazine Halr. She currently teaches creative writing at the Hebrew University. Accidents, her first novel, was a bestseller in Israel and will be published in four languages. Hedaya lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.

"When you read a book like Yael Hedaya's Accidents--a fine-grained, tragicomic, and always gripping portrait of adult love in the making--you wonder why so few such books are produced, and why they are not more fanfared. . . . This book is, in every sense, the real deal."--The Atlantic
 
"[A] rewarding novel . . . utterly realistic and charming . . . Hedaya does an expert job of detailing these two self-conscious cynics' early courtship."--The Forward
 
"Though the three novellas of Hedaya's Housebroken are funny and accomplished, they do not prepare one for the depth of her new novel. . . . Hedaya has an unerring sense of the fear involved in attempting intimacy, and her book contains one of the best descriptions of bad sex with the wrong person."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
"The author's detailed, slowly unfolding story captures the growth of affection and the conflicts inherent in new relationships. . . . Hedaya is able to bring an impressive multidimensionality to her characters."--Booklist