Following his magisterial "To the End of the Land, "the universally acclaimed Israeli author brings us an incandescent fable of parental grief concise, elemental, a powerfully distilled experience of understanding and acceptance, and of art s triumph over death. In "Falling Out of Time, "David Grossman has created a genre-defying drama part play, part prose, pure poetry to tell the story of bereaved parents setting out to reach their lost children. It begins in a small village, in a kitchen, where a man announces to his wife that he is leaving, embarking on a journey in search of their dead son. The man called simply Walking Man paces in ever-widening circles around the town. One after another, all manner of townsfolk fall into step with him (the Net-Mender, the Midwife, the Elderly Math Teacher, even the Duke), each enduring his or her own loss. The walkers raise questions of grief and bereavement: Can death be overcome by an intensity of speech or memory? Is it possible, even for a fleeting moment, to call to the dead and free them from their death? Grossman s answer to such questions is a hymn to these characters, who ultimately find solace and hope in their communal act of breaching death s hermetic separateness. For the reader, the solace is in their clamorous vitality, and in the gift of Grossman s storytelling a realm where loss is not merely an absence but a life force of its own."