Acclaimed nov­el­ist Sayed Kashua, the cre­ator of the ground­break­ing Israeli sit­com, ​“Arab Labor,” has been wide­ly praised for his lit­er­ary eye and dead­pan wit. His new nov­el is con­sid­ered inter­na­tion­al­ly to be his most accom­plished and enter­tain­ing work yet.

Win­ner of the pres­ti­gious Bern­stein Award, Sec­ond Per­son Sin­gu­lar cen­ters on an ambi­tious lawyer who is con­sid­ered one of the best Arab crim­i­nal attor­neys in Jerusalem. He has a thriv­ing prac­tice in the Jew­ish part of town, a large house, speaks per­fect Hebrew, and is in love with his wife and two young chil­dren. One day at a used book­store, he picks up a copy of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, and inside finds a love let­ter, in Ara­bic, in his wife’s hand­writ­ing. Con­sumed with sus­pi­cion and jeal­ousy, the lawyer hunts for the book’s pre­vi­ous own­er — a man named Yonatan — pulling at the strings that hold all their lives together.

With enor­mous emo­tion­al pow­er, and a keen sense of the absurd, Kashua spins a tale of love and betray­al, hon­esty and arti­fice, and ques­tions whether it is pos­si­ble to tru­ly rein­vent our­selves. Sec­ond Per­son Sin­gu­lar is a deli­cious­ly com­plex psy­cho­log­i­cal mys­tery and a sear­ing dis­sec­tion of the indi­vid­u­als that com­prise a divid­ed society.