The Extra

From Israel’s highly acclaimed author, a novel about a musician who returns home and finds the rhythm of her life interrupted and forever changed



Noga, forty-two and a divorcee, is a harpist with an orchestra in the Netherlands. Upon the sudden death of her father, she is summoned home to Jerusalem by her brother to help make decisions in urgent family and personal matters—including hanging on to a rent-controlled apartment even as they place their reluctant mother in an assisted-living facility. Returning to Israel also means facing the former husband who left her when she refused him children, but whose passion for her remains even though he is remarried and the father of two.

For her imposed three-month residence in Jerusalem, the brother finds her work—playing roles as an extra in movies, television, opera. These new identities undermine the firm boundaries of behavior heretofore protected by the music she plays, and Noga, always an extra in someone else’s story, takes charge of the plot.

The Extra is Yehoshua at his liveliest storytelling best—a bravura performance.