These incandescent pages give us one momentous day in the life of Baruch Kotler, a disgraced Israeli politician. When he refuses to back down from a contrary but principled stand regarding the West Bank settlements, his political opponents expose his affair with a mistress decades his junior. He and the fierce young Leora flee the scandal for Yalta, where he comes face to face with the former friend who denounced him to the KGB almost forty years earlier. In a mere 24 hours, Kotler must face the ultimate reckoning, both with those who have betrayed him and with those whom he has betrayed.

Scotiabank Giller Prize 2014 longlist.