CHOSEN AS BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE OBSERVER, NEW YORKER, NEW YORK TIMES BOOKS REVIEW, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT AND THE TIMESLucid and exhilarating . A great gift New York Review of BooksTantalizes and compels ... A welcome reminder of how a novel can be defiantly and brilliantly novel Douglas Kennedy, New StatesmanJules Epstein has vanished: first slowly, then all at once. He begins divesting himself of all of his worldly possessions. Now hes fallen off the face of the earth, and all the search parties can find is his empty monogrammed briefcase, abandoned in the Judean foothills.In her room at the Tel Aviv Hilton, an American novelist has also left home to undergo a transformation. But when a stranger recruits her for a project involving Kafka, she is drawn into a mystery that will take her on a metaphysical journey and change her in ways she could never have imagined.