The Parting Gift, Evan Fallenberg
The Parting Gift, Evan Fallenberg
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The Parting Gift

Author: Evan Fallenberg

Narrator: Seth Podowitz

Unabridged: 4 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/09/2021


Synopsis

This erotic tale of jealousy, obsession, and revenge is suffused with the rich flavors and intoxicating scents of Israel’s Mediterranean coast.

An unnamed narrator writes a letter to an old college friend, Adam, with whom he has been staying since his abrupt return to the States from Israel. Now that the narrator is moving on to a new location, he finally reveals the events that led him to Adam’s door, set in motion by a chance encounter with Uzi, a spice merchant whose wares had developed a cult following.
From his first meeting with Uzi, the narrator is overwhelmed by an animal attraction that will lead him to derail his life, withdraw from friends and extend his stay in a small town north of Tel Aviv. As he becomes increasingly entangled in Uzi’s life—and by extension the lives of Uzi’s ex-wife and children—his passion turns sinister, ultimately threatening all around him.
Written in a circuitous style that keeps you guessing until the end, The Parting Gift is a page-turner and a shrewd exploration of the roles men assume, or are forced to assume, as lovers, as fathers, as Israelis, as Palestinians.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Lark on April 19, 2021

Like many books I've read recently, The Parting Gift perfectly executes what it sets out to do, even if I personally didn't entirely enjoy the experience of reading it. Here is a very tight and tense novel of obsessive jealousy, where sexual encounters are battlegrounds, and where sex acts are the wa......more

Goodreads review by Doug on February 18, 2019

Kind of a Middle Eastern 'The Talented Mr. Ripley', this tight, taut short novel delivers in spades while one is reading it, but yet remained somewhat unsatisfying once it was all over. The narrator is not so much unreliable, as not quite in touch with either his own motivations or what is truly hap......more

Goodreads review by Jessica on February 08, 2019

Like a bitter and vengeful version of Call Me By Your Name, this tight novel provides an almost claustrophobic account of the narrator’s passionate, obsessive, erotic months spent with his lover, Uzi. Written in epistolary form to the unnamed narrator’s college friend, he recalls his doomed relations......more

Goodreads review by Gerhard on November 11, 2018

Huh? That ending? Review to follow. How To Torpedo Your Own Novel.......more

Goodreads review by Stacey on June 08, 2020

This was a double-charged homoerotic tale of obsessive love, lust, jealousy and revenge, set against a lush Middle Eastern backdrop. The unnamed, unlikeable and wholly unrealiable narrator has composed and left behind this detailed letter to his friend Adam as "a parting gift," explaining the detail......more