A Journey to the End of the Millennium

A Journey to the End of the Millennium
A.B. Yehoshua

The year is 999 A.D. Christians in Europe are preparing themselves for the arrival of the Messiah at the millennium and religious fervour is in the air. Sailing from the North African port of Tangier to a small, distant town called Paris are a Jewish merchant, Ben Attar, his two beloved wives and his Arab partner, Abu Lutfi.

They have come for a meeting with their third partner the widower, Raphael Abulafia who has been forced to turn his back on their previous trading partnership because of his new wife’s distrust of the dual marriage of Ben Attar. The latter turns this annual trading voyage into a personal quest to legitimise his second wife, restore his honour and, equally important, to show others the richness and humanity in his way of life.

A confrontation ensues between people of different cultures whose ways of living and loving are so different, and yet who are of the same religion, believe in the same God and in the same morality. Thus we enter a profound human drama whose moral conflicts of fidelity and desire resonate deeply with our times.

A.B. Yehoshua has imaginatively recreated a medieval world with its merchant trade in great depth and sensuous detail. His evocation of one man’s love is lyrical, erotic even, and A Journey to the End of the Millennium will rank with the best of Yehoshua’s work.

'One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.'

Kirkus Review

The novel was also adapted into an opera with libretto by A.B. Yehoshua and music composed by Josef Bardanashavli. The premier was in 2005 at the Tel Aviv Opera.

A.B. Yehoshua

Born in Jerusalem in 1936, A.B. Yehoshua was the author of twelve novels, a collection of short stories, and several plays and volumes of essays. He has won prizes worldwide and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages and adapted for film and opera. An outspoken critic of both Israeli and Palestinian policies, he continued to speak about and search for solutions to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Yehoshua died in June 2022, aged 85.

Visit our Remembering A.B. Yehoshua page to read some of the countless tributes and obituaries that have been written to celebrate Yehoshua’s incredible life and career.

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'A.B. Yehoshua is an old-fashioned master, without stylistic pyrotechnics or needless experimentation. His chief asset is his belief in a powerful story deftly delivered.'

Times Literary Supplement

'Yehoshua is so graceful and eloquent that his work’s timeliness also succeeds, paradoxically, in making it timeless.'

The New York Times

'This is a generous, sensuous narrative, in which women adroitly manoeuvre within their inherited role, and theories of irrevocable Arab-Jewish hatred are obliquely refuted.'

Peter Vansittart, The Spectator

A Journey to the End of the MillenniumA.B. Yehoshua