Three Books, One Suitcase: Heading to Frankfurt

This October I'm packing three novels into a suitcase and getting on a plane to Frankfurt.

I'll be there as part of the eBookPro/Val Cal delegation of Israeli authors - booth 3.1 / A14, if you're wandering the halls and want to say hello - pitching foreign rights and translation for three books that have nothing in common except that I wrote them.

Lydia Ever After is the quiet one. Joe is eighty-three. His wife Lydia's dementia is taking her memory faster than either of them can keep up with, and their daughter, meaning well, gives them a ludicrous AI-generated romance novel to read together - a robot learning to love a woman he can't fix. Joe reads it to Lydia every night anyway. It's a book about what's left of a marriage when the memory that built it starts to go, and about choosing someone anyway, every day, in whatever form they show up as. It's dedicated to my parents, and I don't think I could have written it before I understood why.

The Last Vines on Earth is the strange one. A Chinese porcelain magnate - son of a master whose kilns were smashed in the Cultural Revolution - spends a fortune trying to manufacture what can't be manufactured: the centuries of pedigree behind a French first-growth wine. He builds his rival in a Tibetan valley where a Catholic mission and a Buddhist monastery share a hillside. The idea started, honestly, in a shop, looking at a shelf of things stamped Made in China and wondering what isn't. It's a book about inheritance, authenticity, and what happens when you try to buy your way into a history that only grief and time can actually give you.

FRFR is the nervous one. It's about a student who invents a way to prove a photograph is real, in a world already sliding past the point where anyone can trust what they see - and about what it costs him. I wrote it because the question felt urgent, and it hasn't gotten less urgent since.

Three very different books, but they all keep circling the same thing, I think: how belief gets made, how it breaks, and what's still standing when it does.

If you're a publisher, agent, or scout heading to Frankfurt and any of this sounds like your list, I'd genuinely like to talk. You can find me at the booth October 7–9, or reach out ahead of time:

Represented by: Val Cal Group Agency contact: Tali Carmi - agency@ebook-pro.com

World rights are open on all three titles. I'll have the full rights catalogue on hand at the booth, and I'm happy to send it ahead if you want a look before we meet.

See you in Halle 3.1.

Oded