Love

Love is a short, feverish novella about Libby, a young sex worker in an unnamed Israeli city. Her life makes it hard to tell violence from intimacy, or being treated as an object from being truly loved. It is Maayan Eitan's debut.

Libby spends her time riding in cars, meeting clients, and befriending other sex workers and pimps. The narration stays close to her mind, in spare, lyrical prose that does not look away. To survive under the gaze of men, she tells herself and others a series of invented stories.

After long nights moving between the beds of strangers, a sudden act of violence lets her take charge of her own story. She then works to build something like an ordinary life and keeps looking for love, but it stays out of reach. Gradually she sees that the cheap hotel rooms of her past strangely echo the conventional life she is trying to assemble.

The book provoked a heated public debate in Israel over the line between truth and fiction and over the experiences of women under male power. It can be read as a contemporary allegory of a young woman at breaking point.