A Tale of Love and Darkness is Amos Oz's memoir of his childhood in Jerusalem during the final years of the British Mandate, the struggle for Israeli independence, and the personal tragedy that shaped his life. Oz, who would become one of Israel's most celebrated novelists and a leading voice for peace, was born into a family of multilingual intellectuals who had fled European persecution. His father was a librarian and failed writer; his mother, a dreamer from a wealthy Vilna family who never fully adjusted to the hardships of Jerusalem. The memoir traces young Amos's awakening consciousness as he absorbs both the grand historical drama—the 1947 UN partition vote, the 1948 war—and the intimate domestic story of a mother increasingly lost to depression. When Oz was twelve, his mother took her own life, an event he would spend decades trying to understand and that haunts everything he subsequently wrote. The book is also a portrait of a particular Jerusalem, the world of European immigrants who built Hebrew literature and Israeli statehood. Oz's prose is precise, moving, and occasionally wryly humorous, creating a masterwork of memoir that is simultaneously the story of a family and a nation.