Ten Years Gone полностью

"I doubt it. Mira is the sort of woman who doesn't forget things easily. No, I think there is no future for the two of us."

"I'm sorry, Adam," Greta said.

I looked out the café window onto Allenby Street, where streetlights did battle with the darkness of night. A couple strolled past the window, arm in arm. The laughter of the woman came in faint and lovely through the glass. Loneliness settled in my stomach like a paperweight. I would sleep badly that night. My dreams would be cruel.

"Me too," I said. "Me too."

Dear Reader, (it’s strange talking to you without knowing your name, but I’ll give it a try).

Writing has its own rewards, but having your novel read by another person is uniquely gratifying. So I want to thank you for reading Ten Years Gone. I hope you had a good time with it.

The greatest pleasure I get as a writer is to hear from readers. So drop me an email at contact@jonathandunsky.com with any questions or feedback that you have, or even just to say hi.

Before you go, I’d like to ask you to do a little favor for me. If you enjoyed this book, please leave a review on its Amazon page. Independent authors such as myself depend on reviews to attract new readers to our books. I would greatly appreciate it if you’d share your experience of reading this book by leaving your review on Amazon. It doesn’t have to be long. A sentence or two would do nicely.

Still here?

Great!

I thought you might be interested in knowing about how this book came to be, and how close it came to never being written.

Ten Years Gone traveled a bumpy road on its way to publication. The initial idea came to me sometime in 2015, when I was still living in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, before I moved back to Israel. At the time, I belonged to a writers’ group, and one of the other members suggested that I write a novel that takes place in Israel, because that is the country I know better than any other.

I took her advice to heart, but made it a lot more difficult for myself by setting my story not in the present, but almost seventy years in the past, shortly after Israel gained its independence. Needless to say, my knowledge of that period of time was far from complete, so I had to do quite a bit of research in order to be able to paint a vivid and accurate picture of what life was like in Israel at that time.

The reason I chose this time period was that the character of what I felt could be a great series of books had sprung in my mind one day out of the blue. That character was the yet unnamed Adam Lapid.

What I knew about Adam at that time was that he was a holocaust survivor who now worked as a private investigator in Israel. I knew that he had lost all his family in the holocaust and that he was a loner by nature. Then more details came to mind, such as his country of birth (Hungary), the fact that before the Second World War he’d been a police detective in the Hungarian police force, and that after the war had ended, he spent some time hunting Nazis before coming to Israel, where he fought in Israel’s War of Independence.

After that I painted a physical picture of Adam, his fields of interest, his nature, and his views on life, death, crime, and justice. Naturally, no one could emerge from Auschwitz without being fundamentally altered by the horrors he or she experienced there and, as you read in this novel, Adam has been changed drastically by the hardship he’d faced and all that he’d lost at the hands of the Nazis.

Once I had Adam’s character in mind, an idea for a plot came to me: the search for a baby who’s been missing for ten years. I still didn’t know what had happened to that baby, but the idea felt right for a novel. Excited with the idea, I started writing the novel back in 2015, but hit a wall about four chapters in. In despair, I set the book aside, but the character of Adam Lapid stayed with me. I decided to write another novel, this one set about one year after Ten Years Gone, and hoped to return to the original idea later on. That novel became The Auschwitz Violinist, which is chronologically the third novel in the Adam Lapid series and is available on Amazon.

Following that, I went back to writing Ten Years Gone, and once more couldn’t get it off the ground. So I wrote another novel, The Dead Sister, which takes place before The Auschwitz Violinist and is also available on Amazon.

Now I had two Adam Lapid novels published, and I decided to let the idea for Ten Years Gone die a natural death. But it kept on nagging me, demanding to be written. So I did.

I was back in Israel by then, and for three months I wrote Ten Years Gone, and…it was a flop. I didn’t like it. My wife didn’t like it. The novel just wasn’t good.