Bøker av Herman Wouk

It's everyone's dream: to leave behind the rat-race of the working world and start life all over again amidst the cool breezes, sun-drenched colours, and rum-laced drinks of a tropical paradise. This is the story of Norman Paperman, a New York City press agent who, facing the onset of middle age, runs away to a Caribbean island to reinvent himself as a hotel keeper. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Herman Wouk, who himself lived on an island in the sun for seven years, draws on his own experiences to tell a story at once brilliantly comic and deeply moving about a man's search for happiness, and for himself.

Herman Wouk's classic novel moves on from the grand themes which have won him international acclaim - war, the fate of nations, and the indomitable spirit of man - to the quest for identity, in the clash between the Inside of faith and family and the Outside of the glittery American dream. Inside, Outside sweeps through more than sixty years, from the pre-war, pre-atomic innocence of the twenties and thirties to the turbulent immediate past. Scenes of rollicking family humour and show-business comedy alternate with sudden tragedy, the spectacle of a falling President and the explosion of war. A bittersweet first love, relived after forty years, and a tense secret wartime mission between Washington and Jerusalem call forth the author's renowned storytelling gift. An intense, personal book about intimate things, Inside, Outside is a merry, poignant, sometimes ribald picture of the American Jewish experience, by a master at the peak of his powers.

Committed to fight in the air and on the ground against the monumental resources of the Soviet Union, The Glory charts Israel's successes over Egypt and the commando raid on Fatah HQ in Beirut, the first missile-to-sea fight in history, which helped tip the balance in the Yom Kippur War, and the famous counter-terrorism raid on Entebbe. Shifting between Jerusalem and Washington, Los Angeles and Paris, this is the story of a beleaguered country and the men and women who fought for Israeli Independence and triumphed in the Six-Day War but know their fragile nationhood still hangs by a thread as their own children go into battle.

The Hope is the new State of Israel, and its servants include Zev Barak, a young army officer who rises to become military attach in Washington; Sam Pasternak, arms procurer and master of shuttle diplomacy who heads up military intelligence; Benny Luria, fighter pilot whose finest hour comes over Sinai; Yael, the girl soldier with a penchant for powerful men; Nakhama, the beautiful Moroccan immigrant wife and mother; Kishote, the man with a charmed life who leads an armoured brigade through the desert; and, in America, there is the remarkable Virginia headmistress Emily, whose father is in the CIA.The towering story of modern Israel from Independence to the triumph of the Six-Day War is told through the bittersweet agonies of these people, who between them help create the Hope.