Moving Kings: A Novel

A propulsive, incendiary novel about faith, race, class, and what it means to have a home, from Joshua Cohen, a major American writer (The New York Times)

One of the boldest voices of his generation, Joshua Cohen returns with Moving Kings, a powerful and provocative novel that interweaves, in profoundly intimate terms, the housing crisis in America s poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods with the world's oldest conflict, in the Middle East.

The year is 2015, and twenty-one-year-olds Yoav and Uri, veterans of the last Gaza War, have just completed their compulsory military service in the Israel Defense Forces. In keeping with national tradition, they take a year off for rest, recovery, and travel. They come to New York City and begin working for Yoav s distant cousin David King a proud American patriot, Republican, and Jew, and the recently divorced proprietor of King s Moving Inc., a heavyweight in the tri-state area s moving and storage industries. Yoav and Uri now must struggle to become reacquainted with civilian life, but it s not easy to move beyond their traumatic pasts when their days are spent kicking down doors as eviction-movers in the ungentrified corners of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, throwing out delinquent tenants and seizing their possessions. And what starts off as a profitable if eerily familiar job an Occupation quickly turns violent when they encounter one homeowner seeking revenge.

Praise for Moving Kings

A Jewish Sopranos . . . burly with particularities and vibrant with voice . . . utterly engrossing, full of passionate sympathy . . . Cohen is an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious in American fiction today. . . . His sentences are all-season journeyers, able to do everything everywhere at once. James Wood, The New Yorker

Brilliant. . . . It feels master-planned to slowly unsettle your convictions, as the best novels do. . . . Cohen has a brain-on-fire intellect and a Balzac-grade enthusiasm for understanding varieties of experience. Los Angeles Times

A swift-moving highbrow comic adventure. Vulture

An astute and often penetrating look at a divided world, lightened with sympathy for all its flawed protagonists. The Guardian

A svelte comic triumph that concentrates [Cohen s] genius . . . a fantastically agile style . . . Cohen explores themes of power and Jewish identity with the same insight that has justly attracted praise from some of the country s most sophisticated writers. The Washington Post