A family grapples with its past in David Grossman’s new novel

More Than I Love My Life. By David Grossman. Translated by Jessica Cohen. Knopf; 288 pages; $27. Jonathan Cape; £18.99

NEAR THE beginning of David Grossman’s new novel, Gili, a young Israeli film-maker, is celebrating the 90th birthday of Vera, the grandmother who helped bring her up after her mother vanished. It is 2008. Vera is a survivor of the barbarity inflicted on Yugoslavia during the second world war. Her parents were sent to Auschwitz; Milosz, her first husband and great love, committed suicide after being arrested and tortured in Belgrade.

Vera—“my generous, warm, endlessly devoted, fanatical, tough, cruel grandmother”, Gili calls her—eventually emigrated to Israel, married a widower and looked after her daughter, Nina, and a new stepson, Rafi, mostly trying to put the past behind her. Her care for her second husband, even as she maintained her devotion to Milosz, and the warm relationships she forged with her extended Israeli stepfamily, have made her the matriarch of a sprawling and tight-knit clan.

The party is interrupted by the return of flinty Nina, the prodigal daughter who had conceived Gili with Rafi, only to abandon the baby. Nina’s entrance unleashes a family crisis. And it precipitates an epic journey from Israel to the desolate island of Goli Otok,...