The Lawgiver, Herman Wouk
The Lawgiver, Herman Wouk
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The Lawgiver

Author: Herman Wouk

Narrator: Peter Riegert, Zosia Mamet

Unabridged: 4 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/13/2012


Synopsis

"A lighthearted and delightful tour de force" (The Washington Times).

A romantic and suspenseful epistolary novel about a group of people trying to make a movie about Moses in the present day, The Lawgiver is a story that emerges from letters, memos, e-mails, journals, news articles, Skype transcripts, and text messages.

At the center of The Lawgiver is Margo Solovei, a brilliant young writer-director who has rejected her rabbinical father’s strict Jewish upbringing to pursue a career in the arts. When an Australian multibillionaire promises to finance a movie about Moses, Margo does everything she can to land the job, including reunite with her estranged first love, an influential lawyer with whom she still has unfinished business. Two other key characters in the novel are Herman Wouk himself and his wife of more than sixty years, Betty Sarah, who, almost against their will, find themselves entangled in the movie.

As Wouk and his characters contend with Moses and marriage, the force of tradition, rebellion and reunion, The Lawgiver reflects the wisdom of a lifetime. Inspired by the great nineteenth-century novelists, one of America’s most beloved twentieth-century authors has now written a remarkable twenty-first-century work of fiction.

About Herman Wouk

Herman Wouk was the author of such classics as The Caine Mutiny (1951), Marjorie Morningstar (1955), Youngblood Hawke (1961), Don’t Stop the Carnival (1965), The Winds of War (1971), War and Remembrance (1978), and Inside, Outside (1985). His later works include The Hope (1993), The Glory (1994), A Hole in Texas (2004) and The Lawgiver (2012). Among Mr. Wouk’s laurels are the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Caine Mutiny; the cover of Time magazine for Marjorie Morningstar, the bestselling novel of that year; and the cultural phenomenon of The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, which he wrote over a fourteen-year period and which went on to become two of the most popular novels and TV miniseries events of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1998, he received the Guardian of Zion Award for support of Israel. In 2008, Mr. Wouk was honored with the first Library of Congress Lifetime Achievement for the Writing of Fiction. He died in 2019 at the age of 103.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Leah on December 01, 2012

The problem with epistolary novels is that they are generally more fun to write than to read – which is why, as a writer, I’ve given up on them. Thanks to Mr. Wouk, the world may be subjected to my efforts again – but first I’m going to study this book to figure out how he did it. Somehow, despite t......more

Goodreads review by Briar's Reviews on March 30, 2025

Every year, we have a giant charity book sale and I go and grab as many cool looking books that I can. Cool title? Cool cover? Cool synopsis? Cool author name? Done. I fill up bags full of different books. I read a lot and I like finding new authors to follow. I had NEVER heard of Herman Wouk and apparen......more

Goodreads review by K on January 05, 2013

I love Herman Wouk and love the fact that he's still publishing books at 98. This book was surprisingly modern, too, with e-mails and facebook references and whatnot. Maybe a little too modern for me. I find the new trend of epistolary novels written in sound bytes (see Where'd You Go, Bernadette fo......more

Goodreads review by Olga on December 28, 2012

I am a long-term fan of Wouk, have read or seen or listened to tons of his historic novels. So when I saw this new book, I did not do my usual "due diligence" (read reviews etc.). All I saw "Herman Wouk" and "Moses". I immediately downloaded it on my brand new Samsung Galaxy, and went to it. To mu s......more

Goodreads review by Joseph on October 05, 2021

Herman Wouk's,"The Lawgiver," is probably unlike anything else that this Pulitzer Prize winning author has ever written. Yet, since many of his books have been made into movies or into a TV mini-series (The Caine Mutiny, War and Remembrance) it is not surprising he would know how the real Hollywood......more