A monumental new novel from the bestselling author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

In the book of Genesis, when God calls out, "Abraham!" before ordering him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, Abraham responds, "Here I am." Later, when Isaac calls out, "My father!" before asking him why there is no animal to slaughter, Abraham responds, "Here I am."

How do we fulfill our conflicting duties as father, husband, and son; wife and mother; child and adult? Jew and American? How can we claim our own identities when our lives are linked so closely to others? These are the questions at the heart of Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel in eleven years - a work of extraordinary scope and heartbreaking intimacy.

Unfolding over four tumultuous weeks in present-day Washington, D.C., Here I Am is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. As Jacob and Julia Bloch and their three sons are forced to confront the distances between the lives they think they want and the lives they are living, a catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict in the Middle East. At stake is the meaning of home - and the fundamental question of how much aliveness one can bear.

Showcasing the same high-energy inventiveness, hilarious irreverence, and emotional urgency that readers loved in his earlier work, Here I Am is Foer's most searching, hard-hitting, and grandly entertaining novel yet. It not only confirms Foer's stature as a dazzling literary talent but reveals a novelist who has fully come into his own as one of our most important writers.

Reader Reviews

Lauren

(3/5)

Nov 21, 2024

I was the perfect audience for this novel. I'm a huge fan of JSF's fiction, and I had a Jewish upbringing exactly like the one that was the focus of the book. And yet. Here I Am contains several storylines that were unsuccessfully wound together. We have the imagined destruction of Israel which could have made for a grand and fascinating telling, but it was a more or less an abandoned plot-line. We also have the destruction of a marriage, but there was nothing there we haven't seen before.There...

Ayelet Waldman

(4/5)

Amazing first half. The Israel stuff left me cold.

Paul Bryant

(1/5)

273

If you piled up all the novels which make excruciating forensic microscopic sorrowful comedy out of failing marriages you could make a new Watts Tower out of them, there are so many, and somebody should really do that as an ART STATEMENT, it’s like the default subject of the non-genre novel, and all the sharp witty short story writers do it too, and a lot of them are really good at it, I could give you a list of all these stories and novels about horrible relationships between men and women, it’...

Elyse Walters

370

"Here I Am", is one of those type of books that is likely to receive every possible rating......depending on the readers perspective. Readers can easily justify their options, positive or negative. Rather than get tangled with debates about this novel--controversy chit chat....These are 'my' suggestions ---[take them or leave them]---if on the fence about reading this book.If not clear:Good reasons 'not' to read this novel: ......unrefined and vulgar dialogue ......off-putting characters are of...

Andrew Smith

Let me be clear, I only award one star to books I fail to finish. I failed to finish this book. In fact, I’d barely started it – I was probably no more than an hour into this chunky seventeen-hour audio version. And I don’t think I’ve ever given up any book that early.The problems for me were:1. I didn’t understand much of it2. I didn’t like the bits I did understandI’ve subsequently tried to read a couple reviews of the book, published in newspapers I respect, to see what I am missing out on. B...

Chelsea Humphrey

DNF. Just wasn't for me.

Violet wells

164

Whatever happened to editors? I once read a biography of Max Perkins, editor to Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, among others. The deal back then seemed to be that a manuscript arriving at the offices was 70% done. Perkins then gave his 10% and the final 20% was a collaboration of author and editor. Nowadays it often seems editors do little more than hunt out typos. If Foer had had a Max Perkins – essentially to curb his excesses, something Perkins did very well with Tom Wolfe – this coul...

Jaline

“Sometimes Jacob convinced himself it was better with the swearing and brief flashes of nudity removed, that they were there only because the freedom to do such things had to be justified by exercising it.” This referenced a TV show that Jacob was a writer for, and my wish is that Jacob could have told the author not to exercise that freedom so that people could get past the first few chapters of this book without giving up.My experience of reading this book got off to a rocky start, but to be f...

Kirsty

(5/5)

Since the moment I heard that the god of contemporary authors, Jonathan Safran Foer, was going to be releasing a new novel, the barely-concealed bookworm inside me has been almost continually squealing with excitement. Whilst markedly different to the original information – Escape from Children’s Hospital was supposed to be released in 2015 – his newest novel, Here I Am, is well worth the wait.The novel focuses upon a family living in Washington DC. Jacob and Julia Bloch have been married for si...

Emily May

(2/5)

2 1/2 stars. Foer explores what it means to be a Jew in this epic, messy monster of a book. He starts with a Franzen-style look at the American family - a spiraling web of relationships and conflicts that on its own would have still resulted in a dense, challenging work, but probably one significantly less convoluted and more satisfying.The protagonist is Jacob - a modern day version of the biblical man by the same name. Much of his conflict - internal and external - is either about family or fa...

Lena

This is a second book by this author I've read. I liked it more than Everything is Illuminated, but I still dislike his narrating style. In this story he rises interesting and important topics of family and legacy, history and identity, marriage and divorce. But the way these deep thoughts interwind with descriptions of dog's shit and masturbation (for a couple of pages!) is just annoying and confusing.

·Karen·

It isn't what it's talking about that makes a book Jewish - it's that the book won't shut up. (Philip Roth)Mind you, talking about bar mitzvahs and rituals and Holocaust and eruv and Zionism and homeland and Torah and kosher food and Israel and Hebrew and seder does kind of give the game away.Also: it doesn't shut up.I come away exhausted: the high octane disputatious posturing, the quick-fire wordplay and cross-talk, the swift montage of tweets and text messages and interior monologue and exter...

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Here I Am

Here I Am

Here I Am

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Reader Reviews