Two novels - Gabriel Josipovici

After is haunted by a traumatic memory. A woman re-enters the life of a man after fifteen years - for vengeance? for reconciliation? Or is her return only imagined? Gabriel Josipovici's taut novel draws the reader deep into a relationship, the volatile mix of guilt, memory and desire. Tension builds to a violent climax that shatters illusion.

Making Mistakes explores the ironies of relationships more playfully. In a reworking of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, two couples change partners - and change again - with the connivance of a modern Don Alfonso and his Despina. The cost to the couples of discovering their true desires is high; as in Mozart, things end happily (at least for the moment). The lovers learn that one does not make mistakes, one makes choices.

Both novels reveal Josipovici's celebrated wit and precision, character and narrative revealed through dialogue. Through tense eroticism and sparkling comedy, each explores complexities of twenty-first-century life.

Cover painting: Sisters with Albums (2007) by Andrzej Jackowski. Cover design by David Lane.

Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 to Jewish parents of Italo-Russian, Romano-Levantine extraction. He lived in Egypt from 1945 to 1956, when he came to England. He read English at a St.Edmund Hall, Oxford and from 1963 to 1998 was first a lecturer, then a Professor in the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of some twenty novels, ten books of criticism, a memoir of his mother, the poet Sacha Rabinovitch, and numerous stage and radio plays. His reviews have appeared in the Guardian, The Independent, The Times Literary Supplement, the New York and the London Review of Books.
Carcanet publish his novels and fictions Contre-Jour (1986), In the Fertile Land (1987), Steps (1990), The Big Glass (1991), In a Hotel Garden (1993) and Moo Pak (1995) and his essays Text and Voice (1993). His most recent novels are Goldberg: Variations (Carcanet, 2001) and Only Joking (Zweitausendeins, Germany, 2005). In 2006 Carcanet published a collection of his essays, The Singer on the Shore and his novel Everything Passes.