In the autumn, Molkho's wife dies. His years of loving care have ended and his newfound freedom proves unlike the one he had imagined. It is uneasy, filled with the erotic fantasies of a man who must fall in love, but whose longing for meaningful relationships is held hostage by the spirit of his wife.

Winter sees him in Berlin in a comic encounter with a legal adviser from his office in Haifa. Spring takes him to the Galilee and an impossible infatuation. Jerusalem in the summer brings another man's wife and an extraordinary request. And the following autumn there is Nina whose yearning for her Russian home brings Molkho back to life.

'In this finely observed and oddly moving comic novel¿Yehoshua makes us feel [Molkho's] humanity - and deftly wins him our sympathy.' Kirkus