A Horse Walks into a Bar - David Grossman

ALL HE KNEW was that this was the worst time

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 

A Guardian and New Statesman Book of the Year.

The audience laughs and the man is surprised. ‘Why are you idiots laughing? That joke was about you!’

The setting is a comedy club in a small Israeli town. An audience that has come expecting an evening of amusement instead sees a comedian falling apart on stage; an act of disintegration, a man crumbling, as a matter of choice, before their eyes.

They could get up and leave, or boo and whistle and drive him from the stage, if they were not so drawn to glimpse his personal hell. Dovaleh G, a veteran stand-up comic - charming, erratic, repellent - exposes a wound he has been living with for years: a fateful and gruesome choice he had to make between the two people who were dearest to him.

A Horse Walks into a Bar is a shocking and breath-taking read. Betrayals between lovers, the treachery of friends, guilt demanding redress all are exposed as, flaying alive both himself and the people watching him, Dovaleh G unwinds in an act of very public exposure. It is an act of disclosure that provokes both revulsion and empathy from an audience that doesn't know whether to laugh or cry - and all this in the presence of a former childhood friend who is trying to understand why he's been summoned to this performance.