Flags of the 37 countries participating in Eurovision displayed as books along the staff of sheet music.

Eurovision-A-must-read-book-from-every-country_Online-Desktop_Penguin

Reading lists

The ultimate Eurovision-inspired reading list

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

More Than I Love My Life

More Than I Love My Life... is a profound testament to the emotional power of fiction and shows why some critics regard Grossman as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Immaculately translated by Jessica Cohen, this is another extraordinary novel from Grossman, a book as beautiful and sad as anything you'll read this year.

Unforgettable . . . This adds another remarkable achievement to Grossman's long list.

In More Than I Love My Life he [Grossman] tells a sombre and affecting tale... [a] delicately crafted novel, crisply translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen.

[Grossman gives] vivid voice to each of the characters as they navigate their pain, both present and past... Grossman's 12 previous novels and five volumes of non-fiction have brought him renown on both sides of the Atlantic. This book will earn him more.

[A] concisely devastating novel... [Grossman] has demonstrated again that the novel - elastic, expansive, amenable to painful fragmentation - can provide a space for the most harrowing and resistant material.

Nobody can see the political in the personal like David Grossman. He is an interpreter of hearts and an investigator of social forces. Every book he writes is a revelation.

A moving exploration of the power of love, secrets and forgiveness. A sweeping narrative rooted in a deep faith in humanity.

Grossman is surely now the greatest living Israeli writer. And his new novel, More Than I Love My Life, is arguable his best yet... what makes the book so powerful and complex is not just the daughters' refusal to forgive, but the way Grossman lets the story unfold.

A meditation on love, on memory, and on the power of storytelling.

An epic, deeply moving novel about the power of love and loving with courage - from the Man Booker International Prize-winning author of A Horse Walks into a Bar 
 
 On a kibbutz in Israel in 2008, Gili is celebrating the ninetieth birthday of her grandmother Vera, the adored matriarch of a sprawling and tight-knit family. But festivities are interrupted by the arrival of Nina: the iron-willed daughter who rejected Vera's care; and the absent mother who abandoned Gili when she was still a baby. 
 
 Nina's return to the family after years of silence precipitates an epic journey from Israel to the desolate island of Goli Otok, formerly part of Yugoslavia. It was here, five decades earlier, that Vera was held and tortured as a political prisoner. And it is here that the three women will finally come to terms with the terrible moral dilemma that Vera faced, and that permanently altered the course of their lives. 
 
 More Than I Love My Life is a sweeping story about the power of love and loving with courage. A novel driven by faith in humanity even in our darkest moments, it asks us to confront our deepest held beliefs about a woman's duty to herself and to her children. 
 
 'Grossman's work resonates with emotional intelligence, humanity and truth' Irish Times

A BBC Economics Collection

This is Capitalism

Five eye-opening BBC documentaries about the hidden economic framework that surrounds our every move. 
 
Capitalism is all around us, affecting almost everything we do and impacting our daily lives in myriad ways. This comprehensive collection takes an in-depth look at this all-pervasive economic system, examining its triumphs and disasters and revealing how it puts money and markets at the centre of our world. 
 
In the explosive 10-part series The New Age of Capitalism, Newsnight's David Grossman probes the factors driving the turbo-charged growth in contemporary commerce. Exploring aspects ranging from the 'intangible economy' and AI to the trillion-dollar tech giants, he asks key questions about the way modern capitalism works, and the consequences for society. 
 
Insecure Overachievers sees leaders of elite City firms divulging the secret epidemic of anxiety and insecurity among elite professionals. Exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, they are driven by a deep belief in their own inadequacy, fostered by a competitive work culture that takes advantage of their vulnerabilities. 
 
The Bailout tells the compelling story of the race against time to agree a rescue plan to save Britain's banks from going bust. Told by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, with contributions from Alistair Darling, Mervyn King and Robert Peston, this is a blow-by-blow account of how events unfolded during one incredible week in October 2008. 
 
The Money Clinic goes behind the scenes as families and couples open up about their finances and their feelings with a relationship counsellor. In frank, intimate discussions, they learn how to deal with the financial issues that are coming between them, and receive practical tips on managing both their cash and the emotional side of money. 
 
And in Our House, we meet young Brighton couple Tacita and Charlie, who are desperate to buy their first home - but a property on the south coast is out of their reach. We follow them as, guided by a team of financial experts, they travel back in time to 1968, 1979, 1988, 1997 and 2009 to see which decade would have given them the best chance to get on the housing ladder. 
 
Copyright © 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd 
 
The New Age of Capitalism 
Presented by David Grossman 
Produced by Diane Richardson and Matthew Chapman 
Editor: Hugh Levinson 
With: Jonathan Haskel; Stian Westlake; Tim Wu; James Williams; Diane Coyle; Andrew McAfee; Dr Asa Cusack; Professor Ricardo Hausmann; Fran Boait; Professor Sir Charles Bean; Brad Katsuyama; Professor Donald MacKenzie; Edward Luttwak; James Bloodworth; Joshua Kurlantzick; Dr Linda Yueh; Rana Foroohar; Joshua Ryan-Collins; Adam Lashinsky; Barry Lynn 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 10-21 September 2018 
 
Insecure Overachievers 
Presented by Professor Laura Empson of London's Cass Business School 
Produced by Jonathan Brunert 
With: Jeremy Newman; Alex Michel; Jessica Carmody; Gerry Grimstone, Baron Grimstone of Boscobel; David Morley; Yuval Atsmon; Nigel Jones 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 24 September 2018 
 
The Bailout 
Presented by Gordon Brown 
With: Alistair Darling; Mervyn King; Robert Peston; Shriti Vadera, Baroness Vadera; Kirsty McNeill; Tom Fletcher; Nicolas Sarkozy; Sir John Kingman 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 6 October 2018 
 
The Money Clinic 
Presented by Ruth Alexander 
Produced by Smita Patel 
Editor: Emma Rippon 
Relationship counsellor: Dee Holmes from Relate 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 3-24 August 2019 
 
Our House 
Narrated by Katherine Press 
Written and produced by Rosamund Jones and Paul Kerley 
Production co-ordinator: Janet Staples 
Sound engineer: James Beard 
With: Charlie Chatwood; Tacita French; Jonathan Cribb; Professor Sharon Collard; Professor Claire Langhamer 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 26-30 August 2019

Five eye-opening BBC documentaries about the hidden economic framework that surrounds our every move. 
 
Capitalism is all around us, affecting almost everything we do and impacting our daily lives in myriad ways. This comprehensive collection takes an in-depth look at this all-pervasive economic system, examining its triumphs and disasters and revealing how it puts money and markets at the centre of our world. 
 
In the explosive 10-part series The New Age of Capitalism, Newsnight's David Grossman probes the factors driving the turbo-charged growth in contemporary commerce. Exploring aspects ranging from the 'intangible economy' and AI to the trillion-dollar tech giants, he asks key questions about the way modern capitalism works, and the consequences for society. 
 
Insecure Overachievers sees leaders of elite City firms divulging the secret epidemic of anxiety and insecurity among elite professionals. Exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, they are driven by a deep belief in their own inadequacy, fostered by a competitive work culture that takes advantage of their vulnerabilities. 
 
The Bailouttells the compelling story of the race against time to agree a rescue plan to save Britain's banks from going bust. Told by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, with contributions from Alistair Darling, Mervyn King and Robert Peston, this is a blow-by-blow account of how events unfolded during one incredible week in October 2008. 
 
The Money Clinic goes behind the scenes as families and couples open up about their finances and their feelings with a relationship counsellor. In frank, intimate discussions, they learn how to deal with the financial issues that are coming between them, and receive practical tips on managing both their cash and the emotional side of money. 
 
And in Our House, we meet young Brighton couple Tacita and Charlie, who are desperate to buy their first home - but a property on the south coast is out of their reach. We follow them as, guided by a team of financial experts, they travel back in time to 1968, 1979, 1988, 1997 and 2009 to see which decade would have given them the best chance to get on the housing ladder. 
 
Copyright © 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd 
 
The New Age of Capitalism 
Presented by David Grossman 
Produced by Diane Richardson and Matthew Chapman 
Editor: Hugh Levinson 
With: Jonathan Haskel; Stian Westlake; Tim Wu; James Williams; Diane Coyle; Andrew McAfee; Dr Asa Cusack; Professor Ricardo Hausmann; Fran Boait; Professor Sir Charles Bean; Brad Katsuyama; Professor Donald MacKenzie; Edward Luttwak; James Bloodworth; Joshua Kurlantzick; Dr Linda Yueh; Rana Foroohar; Joshua Ryan-Collins; Adam Lashinsky; Barry Lynn 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 10-21 September 2018 
 
Insecure Overachievers 
Presented by Professor Laura Empson of London's Cass Business School 
Produced by Jonathan Brunert 
With: Jeremy Newman; Alex Michel; Jessica Carmody; Gerry Grimstone, Baron Grimstone of Boscobel; David Morley; Yuval Atsmon; Nigel Jones 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 24 September 2018 
 
The Bailout 
Presented by Gordon Brown 
With: Alistair Darling; Mervyn King; Robert Peston; Shriti Vadera, Baroness Vadera; Kirsty McNeill; Tom Fletcher; Nicolas Sarkozy; Sir John Kingman 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 6 October 2018 
 
The Money Clinic 
Presented by Ruth Alexander 
Produced by Smita Patel 
Editor: Emma Rippon 
Relationship counsellor: Dee Holmes from Relate 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 3-24 August 2019 
 
Our House 
Narrated by Katherine Press 
Written and produced by Rosamund Jones and Paul Kerley 
Production co-ordinator: Janet Staples 
Sound engineer: James Beard 
With: Charlie Chatwood; Tacita French; Jonathan Cribb; Professor Sharon Collard; Professor Claire Langhamer 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 26-30 August 2019

The Smile Of The Lamb

The first Israeli novel written about the occupation of the West Bank, by one of the most influential writers of his generation.

An extraordinary achievement...moving, many-layered, powerful, yet written with beautiful delicacy of touch, is a work of redemption... Combining the compassionate wisdom of the moralist with a true artist's creative imagination, this book deserves the widest possible audience

Bold, grand, mad, an astonishing meditation on art, religion, love, politics and war, despatched in language which is funny, ferocious and enraptured

A courageous novel, the first attempt by an Israeli author of the post-1967 generation to come to terms with the consequences of the Occupation, to articulate how 'the conqueror is also the conquered, and injustice has teeth in its tail'

Extreme, enormous, almost embarrassingly good, a first novel whose very last page somehow fuses together the political and spiritual currents running through modern day Israel

At once sensitive, humane, elegiac and devoid of optimism, save a vague faith in love

Masterful irony and passion... the sustained poetic intensity of many passages is impressive

From its very first pages one is aware of Grossman's potential range and originality...Khilmi, an Arab storyteller, is the novel's great imaginative narrative achievement... What a rare pleasure to read a novel in which the novelist's narrative and ideas are so gripping, they are worth arguing about! Here we have authentic talent

Grossman has made a habit of peeling away the camouflage that obfuscates Israel's more painful wounds

His fiction is earnest, sympathetic, human and highly readable

Uri and Katzman are Israeli soldiers occupying a Palestinian village in the West Bank. Uri is idealistic and full of hope, feels the injustice of the occupation keenly, and becomes close to Khilmi, the village storyteller. Katzman on the other hand is 'a contracted muscle' - he has taught himself not to feel. And Shosh, Uri's wife, daughter of liberal immigrant parents and juvenile psychiastrist, is succumbing to her own struggles with power and truth. 
 
When Khilmi's adopted son is killed in a 'security operation' and when Uri discovers how far deception and injustice have penetrated into his own life, their reactions are drastic and unforseen.

The Book Of Intimate Grammar

A stunning novel - a searing psychological portrait of a child's descent into madness

It's a rare achievement for the magic of childhood to be treated so weightily

When the Israeli writer David Grossman's See Under: Love was published...he was compared legitimately to Kafka, Grass, Márquez and Joyce....David Grossman's own intimate grammar will speak to anyone who was ever twelve

It is an achievement that is full of charm and courage

Like [Virginia] Woolf, Grossman is uncanny at reproducing an experience from the inside out...the writing reminds you of the great, solemn mystery of literature, what the poet Czeslaw Milosz calls 'the human possibility of being someone else

Mr. Grossman's balance between the poetic and the profane is perfect....[The Book of Intimate Grammar] is See Under: Love's stylistic twin: the beauty and intelligence of the writing are dazzling....It can be read at once, as a tale of magic realism, a parable about the damage left in the wake of the Holocaust, a psychological portrait of a child's descent into madness, and, finally, as a comical but searing indictment of the Jewish family

Eleven years old and on the cusp of puberty, Aron Kleinfeld is precocious, imaginative - the leader of his gang of friends. But his bar mitzvah is looming, his friends are all hitting puberty and Aron, terrified and revolted by what he sees around him, enters a state of arrested development. He stops growing, retreats from the world, and is imprisoned in the body of a child for three long years. While Israel inches towards the Six-Day War, and his friends cross the boundary between childhood and adolescence, Aron remains in his child's body, spying on the changes that adulthood wreaks as, like his hero Houdini, he struggles to escape the trap of growing up.

Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

Sleeping on a Wire

A ground-breaking and profundly important portrayal of the Arab population in Israel

Intelligent, sympathetic, resonant and accessible

Outstanding... Unblinkingly harsh, this journey is also, in its sheer honesty and decency, a work of hope

The Yellow Wind established Grossman as one of Israel's finest political writers. His latest examination of the Palestinian tragedy is of equal quality, sympathetic without being patronising, sensitive to the point of pain

A writer of passionate self-honesty, unafraid to ask terrible questions

A fine, sympathetic book... Its insights reverberate far beyond the Middle East

Grossman has continued the honourable tradition of giving voice to the vocally disenfranchised

Grossman is an acute and sceptical observer, reckoning with the double and triple languages his subjects use to negotiate their lives in Israel, wrestling honourably with his own reactions

He is a good and honest and comprehending listener

Israel: Jewish state and national homeland to Jews the world over. But a fifth of its population is Arab, a people who feel themselves to be an inseparable part of the Arab nation, most of which is still technically at war with the State of Israel. 
 
In the summer of 1991 David Grossman set out on a journey into the world of Arab citizens of his country. Sleeping on a Wire is an account of what he found. It is about men and women fighting to find a voice, to pick out the pulse of their own identity in a land that doesn't seem to be theirs. He has not written about open conflict. Rather it is a story of ferment beneath the surface, and an intensifying bitterness which can only exacerbate the troubles of the Middle East.

The Yellow Wind

A book that changed how we think about the Israeli-Palestine conflict: a book that knows that the enemy is not the Palestinian or the Israeli but the extremist and fanatic on either side

Beautifully written and highly perceptive

Even the most cautious readers – and even the most hostile – are bound to learn something about the conflict that they never knew before…something deep and achingly, damningly, true

A brilliant, searing examination of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank…beautiful, passionate, and profoundly disturbing

Written with tremendous conviction and power

First published in 1988, The Yellow Wind is Israeli novelist David Grossman’s impassioned account of what he observed on the West Bank in early 1987: not only the misery of the Palestinian refugees and their deep-seated hatred of the Israelis, but also the moral cost of occupation for both occupier and occupied. With the unstinting eye of the investigative journalist combined with the humane compassion of the novelist, Grossman channels the myriad human voices of the conflict, weaving them into an indelible account of one of the most intractable tragedies of modern times.

David Grossman

The greatest Israeli writer of his generation

There are some writers in whose words one recognizes the texture of life. David Grossman is such a writer. He is a master of the emotionally accurate and significant

Written with passion and moral urgency… [The Thinking Heart] reminds us that many of the best Israeli writers have been the moral conscience of their nation

On Israel and Palestine

*Winner of the Heinrich Heine Prize for Literature* 
 
A hundred and fifty years of conflict. What does that do to a person’s soul, to the spirit of a nation? To both the occupied and the occupier? 
 
International Booker Prize-winning Israeli novelist David Grossman has spent decades campaigning for peace in Israel and Palestine. But after October 7th 2023, a day marking the biggest loss of Jewish life in this century, he retreated inwards to ask himself difficult and necessary questions about his beloved nation: 
 
How could this massacre have happened? 
How could the Netanyahu government, tangled in its web of scandals, fail to protect its citizens? 
And did October 7 and the war that followed take with it their last hope of a two-state solution? 
 
In eleven essays David Grossman traces the years leading up to that day and the ensuing war through a string of failures by a morally bankrupt party clinging to power. He documents the struggle being fought on both sides between those committed to conflict, and the many who simply want to live in peace. 
 
Ultimately, Grossman arrives at the most important question of all: Will there ever be a lasting peace in the region?

David Grossman

Praise for The Thinking Heart

The greatest Israeli writer of his generation

There are some writers in whose words one recognizes the texture of life. David Grossman is such a writer. He is a master of the emotionally accurate and significant

Written with passion and moral urgency… [The Thinking Heart] reminds us that many of the best Israeli writers have been the moral conscience of their nation

The greatest Israeli writer of his generation

There are some writers in whose words one recognizes the texture of life. David Grossman is such a writer. He is a master of the emotionally accurate and significant

Written with passion and moral urgency… [The Thinking Heart] reminds us that many of the best Israeli writers have been the moral conscience of their nation

The greatest Israeli writer of his generation

There are some writers in whose words one recognizes the texture of life. David Grossman is such a writer. He is a master of the emotionally accurate and significant

Written with passion and moral urgency… [The Thinking Heart] reminds us that many of the best Israeli writers have been the moral conscience of their nation

Books by David Grossman

Articles featuring David Grossman

The ultimate Eurovision-inspired reading list

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter