My final book of 2016 proved to be one of the best.  Judas, the most recent novel by Amos Oz, is set in Jerusalem in the late 1950s.  Shmuel Ash, a young biblical scholar, forced to abandon his studies and recently jilted by his girlfriend, finds work as a resident caregiver for a cantankerous old scholar called Gershom Wald. Living with them in the old Jerusalem house is Atalia Abravanel, the widow of Wald’s only son and the daughter of a disgraced Zionist leader.

The novel works brilliantly on so many levels.  It’s a tender love story and a sensitive coming-of-age tale.  It’s also a piercing, deeply intelligent study of betrayal and of the soul of the state of Israel.  There is some beautiful writing here, with passages I found myself re-reading several times.  It’s a story that stays in the mind long after you turn the final page, much like a biblical tale from which the novel draws its title. It was my first novel by Oz and now I can’t wait to read others.

With this wonderful novel my reading in 2016 comes to a close.  It started in Saxon England in a mysterious landscape of ogres and warriors and ended in Jerusalem in 1959.  Where will next year’s books take me?