And the War Is Over . . .

Now available in India. Forthcoming in rest of the world in October 2024.

Three short story collections that sink into the lives of characters seeking meaning in a post-war world, available in a boxed set.

Sharp as a razor and as subtle as gossamer, Shmuel T. Meyer’s masterfully crafted stories evoke unique individual sensibilities and destinies, resonating with the sensual details, smells, tastes, music and sounds of a specific time and place. And the War Is Over brings together three collections of short stories set on three continents in the aftermath of war: World War II and the Shoah in Grand European Express, the Korean War in The Great American Disaster and the Arab-Israeli conflict in Kibbutz.

Characters both real and imagined run through a fabric so tightly woven that the threads of history and fiction can barely be separated: the Roman poet Clara who will never write again; Saul, a New York City police detective haunted by memories of the Pusan Perimeter; a brother out to avenge his sister’s murder; the son of a former Nazi who joins the Red Army Faction. Tracing moments of encounter, their paths cross those of Allen Ginsberg, Albert Cossery, John Coltrane and Duke Ellington. Characters travel by train from Venice to Paris, hike up the Val d’Annivers, listen to jazz in Greenwich Village and ride a motorcycle along the sandy road to Haifa. Under the shadow of war, with death lurking, these multifaceted, evocative lives move in a space between coincidence and fate.

‘French-Israeli author Shmuel T. Meyer’s short story collection And the War Is Over starts in Europe just after World War II and takes us to New York just after the Korean War. The three-volume boxed set seems to be actually designed by an artist, not patched together from stock images. It is a pleasure to behold. The print is easy on the eye. The pages number fewer than 250, and the effect of that restraint is to slow us down to taste every word. The translation from the French Et la Guerre Est Finie, by Gila Walker, lets the prose shine through.’—Latha Anantharaman, The Hindu. Read the full review here.