House Arrest

Short synopsis

Asa Fogel, an unemployed professor, newly separated from his wife, awakes one morning to startling news: his beloved mother, deputy director of the Theodore Hirsch Centre for Sustainable Peace, professor of Israel studies, a refined collector of Israeli art and an avid member of several charitable associations is suspected of embezzling 3.4 million shekels from her place of work.

Asa now attempts to navigate within this turbulent reality: between his sister, who is convinced their mother is innocent, and his skeptical brother; between the wife he has just separated from and who is still present in everyone’s lives, and his friends who disappear; between old mistakes and new insults all played out in front of a

relentless media.

More than anything, he must reconsider the character of the mother that he knows so well. Who is this woman with the wonderful sense of humor, sharp wit and a ready inclination for righteousness, who now sits under house arrest?

HOUSE ARREST takes apart its characters with a sharpened knife, building from them an original, tumultuous novel about family and money, motherhood and children, failure and success, social standing and self-image.

Stockholm consists of eight sections — one for each day of the drama. Each section is narrated from the point of view of one of the friends. In this way, the reader is introduced to their life stories and to the long-standing and complicated friendship that exists between them.

Selected Reviews

“All this abundance, in which one family becomes a mirror to an entire social class in Israel, cannot but bring to mind Yaakov Shabtai’s ‘Past Continuous’… One should run, run to buy this book.”

"Yedlin is a well-known, pleasurable champion of everything Israeli. She knows how to take everyday interactions and to dissect them so that the pathological components are revealed. This is our DNA, and Yedlin turns it into colorful, delightful spools of humor that are both dark and witty."

“An excellent book. A lucid, clear and distinct voice, intellectual as well as hot-blooded. Yedlin has the gift of a natural storyteller, and her contemporaries in Hebrew literature will have to work very hard to reach the bar she has set.”

"One of the promising voices of Hebrew literature… A challenging and witty novel by an intelligent, wise and uncompromising author. This novel is well worth reading."

"Yedlin's witty, sharp-toothed satire is not deaf to the infiltration of the lyrical murmurings of the heart. Yedlin's natural curiosity is invested here, and it is this curiosity, that of good prose writers, that is not just an artistic virtuosity but borders on moral virtue."

“A riveting book that examines the Ashkenazim in a sarcastic but also compassionate manner, as a tribe, as a community with its own nuances and rules.”

“A must-read for every man.”

"A very witty novelist who deals with the cream of Israeli society."

“Raising the Israeli bar for literary thrillers and drama… Yedlin draws a very fine line between drama and character assassination, between madness and intelligence.”