Celebrated Israeli author David Grossman has written a new novel about coming to terms with the death of a child, to be published five years after his 20-year-old son was killed in the final days of Israel's war with Lebanon.
Falling Out of Time is about the pain and shock of bereavement. It is not autobiographical, nor is it set in Israel, according to Grossman's editor, Menahem Perry. But, he told the Haaretz newspaper, the author had to "dive into the deepest realm of his private feelings".
Grossman's son, Uri, was killed in August 2006 when a missile struck his tank in southern Lebanon two days before a ceasefire ordered by the UN came into force.
Grossman, a peace activist as well as novelist, had publicly called for an end to the fighting two days earlier.
In a powerful eulogy at Uri's funeral, Grossman described answering his door in the middle of the night to find the army waiting with the news of his son's death. "And I thought to myself – that's it, life's over," he said.
The new novel will be published in Hebrew in June and later in English. Grossman has decided not to promote it with media interviews.
"I understand and respect his decision," Perry told Haaretz. "An enormous amount of emotional energy was invested in the book. And talking about it, or doing an interview in which he will be asked about other things, will detract from the book's carefully chosen words, which one simply has to read."
Grossman's last novel, To the End of the Land, was about the mother of a young Israeli man about to complete his military service when a war breaks out.
As he heads to the front, his mother embarks on a long hike in northern Israel to avoid possible news about her son's death or injury being delivered to her home by the army "notifiers".
The author, who began writing To the End of the Land several months before Uri was drafted, said at the time of publication, in spring 2008, that his son had been "very familiar with the plot ... and the characters" and would frequently ask to be brought up to date.
"I had a feeling, or more accurately, a wish that the book I was writing would protect him," Grossman said.
It was completed after Uri's death. "Most of it was already written. What changed, more than anything else, was the resonance of the reality in which the final version was written."
Writing, he told the Observer last year, was "a way of fighting against the gravity of grief".
He said: "I would not have chosen this catastrophe. But since it happened, I want to explore it. I feel I was thrown into no man's land and the only way to allow my life to coexist with death is to write about it."