A horse walks into a bar

The setting is a comedy club in a small Israeli town. An audience that has come expecting an evening of amusement instead sees a comedian coming apart on stage, an act of disintegration, a man crumbling, as a matter of choice, before their eyes. They could get up and leave, or boo and whistle and drive him from the stage, if they were not so drawn to glimpse his personal hell. Dovale Gee, a veteran stand-up comic - charming, erratic, repellent - exposes a wound he has been living with for years - a fateful and gruesome choice he had to make between the two people who were dearest to him.

A Horse Walks into a Baris a shocking and breathtaking read. Betrayals between lovers, the treachery of friends, guilt demanding redress. On stage the comic is torn between his commitment to his audience and the debt he owes to himself. Flaying alive both himself and the people watching him, Dovale Gee provokes both revulsion and empathy from an audience that doesn't know whether to laugh or cry - and all this in the presence of a former childhood friend who is trying to understand why he's been summoned to this performance.

David Grossman has reached yet another literary peak that is emotionally equal to his previous books and stunning, even outrageous, in its inventions and complexity.