Ode to Joy – Shifra Horn

Condition : Good.
Piatkus, 2005, Large-format Paperback – Fiction – 264 pp.
Following a terrorist explosion on a bus in Jerusalem, Yael, a married mother who narrowly escaped the attack, is haunted by the last image she recalls before the horror: a little blonde child waving to her from the window of the bus, and the sound of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, which was playing on her car radio.
Yael’s husband, Nachum, seems unable, or unwilling to understand what she has been through, and although her friends and colleagues are sympathetic, they cannot share her pain. Still traumatised, she feels compelled to seek out the blonde child’s grieving father, the enigmatic and mysterious Avshalom. Drawn to him through their mutual suffering and fascinated by his unusual background, Yael begins to fall helplessly in love with him. Avshalom too, cannot deny his own feelings, but his belief that the loss of his wife and child is divine punishment for past sins overshadows any glimmer of hope for their future.