Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen won much praise for her second, award-winning novel ‘Waking Lions’, which lobbed moral obstacles in front of a doctor who gets caught up in a hit and run incident. Her latest (translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston) is set in the US – Silicon Valley to be precise – and once again she casts its protagonists into an arena built from moral ambiguities. Lilach is living a seemingly idyllic existence. Her husband is earning big bucks working in the tech sector and her teenage son, Adam, is doing well at school. She, meanwhile, works in a care home where she screens, and gives talks about, classic films. But when a local synagogue becomes the site of a terrorist attack, a frisson of fear ripples through the Jewish community. A further consequence of the outrage sees Adam joining a self-defence class, which is taught by a former Special Forces officer who becomes something of a guru to his pupils. Later, a Black teenager dies at a house-party and rumours begin to circulate that Adam and his friends are somehow involved in his death. ‘The Wolf Hunt’ is a real slow-burn thriller, but it feels Hitchcockian in scope in that the author is using genre tropes to explore all sorts of other themes including race, trust, masculinity, familial relations and a lot more besides. As the narrative slowly unfurls it exerts an ever-tighter grip and the ending is as satisfying as it is unexpected. RM

Pushkin Press