Someone to Run With

Someone to Run With

A Novel

David Grossman, Vered Almog, Translator, and Maya Gurantz, Translator

WINNER OF THE JEWISH QUARTERLY WINGATE PRIZE FOR FICTION

Capturing the lives of Israeli street kids, follows two teenagers—Assaf, a shy and awkward sixteen year old, and Tamar, a talented young singer—and the missing dog that brings them together.

David Grossman's Someone to Run With tells the story of a lost dog, and the discovery of first love on the streets of Jerusalem, portrayed here with a gritty realism that is as fresh as it is compelling.

When awkward and painfully shy sixteen-year-old Assaf is asked to find the owner of a stray yellow lab, he begins a quest that will bring him into contact with street kids and criminals, and a talented young singer, Tamar, engaged on her own mission: to rescue a teenage drug addict.

A runaway bestseller in Israel, in the words of the Christian Science Monitor: "It's time for Americans to fall in love with (Grossman's) Someone to Run With."

“Someone to Run With reveals again that Grossman is one of contemporary literature's most versatile and absorbing writers....A deceptively simple story that is another revelation of Grossman's genius.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Beautiful and arresting...Grossman has created a place of great dangers and improbable strokes of fortune, of compelling suspense and love's labors gained.” —Los Angeles Times
“Passionate and heartfelt...a story that is at once universal and specific, a classical fable of love brought to contemporary Israel.” —Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review

About the Authors

David Grossman, born in Jerusalem in 1954, is one of Israel’s most widely read and translated writers. His fiction and nonfiction return to the questions at the heart of Jewish-Israeli life: the long shadow of the Holocaust, the fragility of family and memory, and the human cost of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His novel See Under: Love (1986) approaches the Shoah through the imaginative worlds of children and of the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz. To the End of the Land (2008) follows an Israeli mother who sets out on a long walk through the country to avoid the news she fears about her soldier son. Alongside his novels, he has written The Yellow Wind (1987), a nonfiction account of life under occupation in the West Bank, and Sleeping on a Wire (1992), about Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Grossman’s work is shaped by his public role as an advocate for peace and a critic of violence on all sides, and by personal loss: his son Uri was killed in 2006 while serving in the Second Lebanon War, an experience that deepened Falling Out of Time (2011) and his later writing. His recognitions include the Emet Prize (2007), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2010), the Man Booker International Prize (2017) for A Horse Walks into a Bar, shared with translator Jessica Cohen, and the Israel Prize (2018). His books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

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