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BEAUFORT
Ron Leshem
Delacorte Press
Fiction
ISBN: 9780553806823
• Critical Praise
• Read a Review
• Read an Excerpt
• Author Interview –&ndash February 1, 2008
By turns subversive and darkly comic, brutal and tender, Ron Leshem's debut novel is an international literary sensation, winner of Israel's top award for literature and the basis for a prizewinning film. Charged with brilliance and daring, hypnotic in its intensity, BEAUFORT is at once a searing coming-of-age story and a novel for our times --- one of the most powerful, visceral portraits of the horror, camaraderie, and absurdity of war in modern fiction.
Beaufort. To the handful of Israeli soldiers occupying the ancient crusader fortress, it is a little slice of hell --- a forbidding, fear-soaked enclave perched atop two acres of land in southern Lebanon, surrounded by an enemy they cannot see. And to the thirteen young men in his command, Twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Liraz “Erez” Liberti is a taskmaster, confessor, and the only hope in the face of attacks that come out of nowhere and missions seemingly designed to get them all killed.
All around them, tension crackles in the air. Long stretches of boredom and black humor are punctuated by flashes of terror. And the threat of death is constant. But in their stony haven, Erez and his soldiers have created their own little world, their own rules, their own language. And here Erez listens to his men build castles out of words, telling stories, telling lies, talking incessantly of women, sex, and dead comrades. Until, in the final days of the occupation, Erez and his squad of fed-up, pissed-off, frightened young soldiers are given one last order: a mission that will shatter all remaining illusions --- and stand as a testament to the universal, gut-wrenching futility of war.
BEAUFORT © Copyright 2008 by Ron Leshem. Reprinted with permission by Delacorte Press. All rights reserved.
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Critical Praise
"Ron Leshem has succeeded in creating an entire world, simply through language."
––– David Grossman, author of The Yellow Wind
"A gripping, viscerally powerful tale.... An alternately grim and blackly comic war/coming-of-age novel."
––– Kirkus Reviews
"An important novel.... This is a picture of war from a soldier's point of view. Its language is crude, the body count rises, and yet the tenderness of the bonds among the men is extraordinary."
––– Library Journal, starred review
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