Parvulescu

Jonah and His Daughter offers us an affectionate and vivid account of the reluctant, recalcitrant prophet Jonah, passed down from mother to daughter over the course of thousands of years, from the eighth century B.C. to the present day. In a sweeping narrative that pans out from the ancient port of Jaffa in the eastern Mediterranean to the modern-day cities of Prague, Munich, London and Bucharest, the first storyteller we meet is Jonah’s daughter herself, and the last is a proud mother of twins in our own time.

A colourful, variegated tapestry of tales within tales that interweaves myth, legend, family histories, and psychologies, the novel expands upon a familiar Biblical story in order to meditate on permanence and change, on the unfolding of self through storytelling, and the irreducible mystery of the narrated self.