A former circus clown who was spared the gas chamber so that he might entertain thousands of other Jews as they marched to their deaths, Adam is now the ringleader at an asylum for Holocaust survivors, struggling to make sense of a world in which the line between sanity and madness has been blurred.

Yoram Kaniuk was born in Tel Aviv in 1930 and took part in Israel's War of Independence in 1948. A painter, journalist, and theater critic, he is best known as a novelist. His books have been translated to great acclaim into twenty languages and have earned him the Bialik Prize, the French Prix de Droits de l'Homme, and the Israeli President's Prize.