Jonathan Safran Foer to publish first novel in a decade

Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer 

to publish first novel in a decade

Here I Am is the story of an American Jewish family, set against a background of traumatic events in the Middle East


Alison Flood
Monday 21 December 2015 12.27 GMT

Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel in 11 years, set against a backdrop where Israel is invaded and the Middle East has been hit by an earthquake, will be published next autumn.

Called Here I Am, the novel will take place in Washington, where a Jewish family with three sons faces the fallout as the parents’ marriage struggles. According to the New York Times, which reported its acquisition by US press Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the title is drawn from the book of Genesis, in which Abraham is tested by God and asked to sacrifice his son Isaac:

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.’

The novel sees relatives from Israel visiting the troubled family in Washington for the bar mitzvah of one of the sons, while in the wider world, the Middle East has been devastated by an earthquake and Israel is being invaded.

“You wouldn’t mistake any sentence of it for any other writer,” acquiring editor Eric Chinski told the New York Times. “It’s got this high-wire inventiveness and intensity of imagination in it, and the sheer energy that we associate with Jonathan’s writing, but it’s a big step forward for him. It’s got a kind of toughness; it’s dirty, it’s kind of funny, like Portnoy’s Complaint, it exposes American Jewish life.”

Here I Am will be published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton next September. A previous novel by Foer that had been acquired by the Penguin imprint three years ago, Escape From Children’s Hospital, has now been “moved off the schedule”, said Hamish Hamilton. That novel was a “fictionalised account of when an explosion in a summer camp science class left Safran Foer’s best friend without skin on his face or hands, leaving the author unscathed by inches”, according to the Bookseller.

Foer’s previous novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, was published in 2005, telling the story of a nine-year-old boy on a quest to unravel the mystery of a key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Centre attacks on 11 September. His debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, won the Guardian first book award. In 2010, he published Tree of Codes, which created a new story using the words of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles.

THE GUARDIAN