CHOSEN AS BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE OBSERVER, NEW YORKER, NEW YORK TIMES BOOKS REVIEW, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT & THE TIMES` Lucid & exhilarating. A great gift` New York Review of Books` Tantalizes & compels.. . A welcome reminder of how a novel can be defiantly & brilliantly novel` Douglas Kennedy, New Statesman Jules Epstein has vanished: first slowly, then all at once. He begins divesting himself of all of his worldly possessions. Now he`s fallen off the face of the earth, & 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 & change her in ways she could never have imagined.