Between Life and Death is a startlingly brave, funny, poetic, and moving autobiographical novel about the four months Yoram Kaniuk spent in a coma near the end of his life.

"First published as Al Ha-Cheam Ve-Al Ha-Mavet by Yedioth Ahronoth Books and Chemed Books, Tel Aviv, 2007."

"Yoram Kaniuk, who passed away in 2013, was for a long time the enfant terrible of a generation of Israeli writers that included Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman. Less known to American readers than he deserves, Kaniuk is a strange and orthogonal writer, never lining up with the pieties his audience might be expected to harbor . . . [Between Life and Death], published by Restless Books and ably translated by Barbara Harshav, takes as its subject Kaniuk's four-month near-death interlude in a Tel Aviv hospital . . . The book's style embodies this 'betweeness,' proceeding with the associative logic of an anesthetic rather than an authorial consciousness. Kaniuk is in his head and out of his body, often at the same time . . . There is something undeniably admirable in the work to turn suffering into art. The final words of Kaniuk's epilogue constitute a goodbye, rather than a see you later: 'And now, as an old man with cancer and a hernia and a destroyed belly, I leave you.' We are poorer for Kaniuk's final exit, and reminded that the time between life and death is a wisp of a shadow that passes in the blink of an eye."

-Ari Hoffman, Jewish Book Council