The Thessaloniki Book Fair was launched in 2004 and is the largest book fair in Southeast Europe. It is considered one of the most important cultural institutions in Greece and has received international recognition. This year, 90,000 visitors attended the four-day fair that was held from May 7-11. Six hundred publishers and organizations from 40 countries participated in the fair, and 1,000 authors were in attendance. In 2014, Israel was the guest country at the fair. This year, the guest country was the United States.
The Israeli embassy set up a pavilion under the branding of Israel’s 75th anniversary, staffed by the embassy and volunteers from the city’s Jewish community. In addition, in cooperation with the local publishing house, Kastaniotis Editions, the embassy initiated and supported the invitation of Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen to the fair, who presented her book “The Liar and the City,” which was recently translated into Greek and became the focal point of a panel discussion at the fair, featuring journalist Grigoris Bekos.
“The Liar and the City” by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, one of the most successful Israeli writers in the world today, places at its centre a story that begins with an innocent mistake and unfolds as if by itself, uncontrollably. A charged encounter in the backyard of an ice cream parlour transforms Nofar from a girl no one notices into a national symbol and media star whose closeness everyone seeks. But one person knows that “Cinderella” became a princess only because of a lie that has swelled to horrifying proportions. Lavi Maimon, a skinny and insecure teenager, is the only witness to what really happened in the backyard, and he sets a condition for Nofar: If she doesn’t want him to expose her publicly as a liar, she will have to pay the price he asks. What begins as a nasty blackmail turns into a fragile and passionate relationship.
It will soon become clear that in “The Liar and the City,” reality is woven of lies – big and small, white and black. Lies upon which a state is built, and lies that make a family exist. Lies that flourish in the era of post-truth, and those that have always been told wherever people live. In the busy streets of the big city – which is also one of the book’s protagonists, a deaf mute who knows a secret and a suspicious policewoman, an elderly Moroccan woman posing as a Holocaust survivor, and a beautiful sister with burning jealousy, all are revealed in all of their cruelty, yet at the same time full of human love.
“The Liar and the City” is Ayelet Gundar -Goshen’s third book. Her previous books have been translated into fourteen languages and have won prizes, including the Sapir Prize for debut novels and the British Wingate Prize. Italy’s La Repubblica called Gonder-Goshen’s style “an explosive voice in a new generation of Israeli writers.” Indeed, in “The Liar and the City” – which was distributed in eleven countries before it was released in Israel – Gonder-Goshen tells a story in which aggression and victimization do not stand on opposite sides of a clear moral divide, but twist together until it is difficult to discern who is who.