DUEL

A 12-year-old helps a septuagenarian friend weather a potentially deadly misunderstanding in this brief, reflective import, winner of a British prize for translated works. His mother may disapprove, but David enjoys being around old people—particularly a spry, sharp photographer named Heinrich. That pleasure turns to horror, however, when a furious rival from a decades-old love affair accuses Heinrich of theft, and, of all things, challenges him to a duel. For complex reasons, Heinrich accepts, leaving David to search frantically for a way to head off the impending tragedy. Even though he casts David as an adult looking back on the incident, Grossman cranks up the suspense with frequent cuts back and forth in time, plus side meditations on growing up, and growing old; in the end, David does find a way to head off the stiff-necked duelists, and the episode even kindles new friendships. Set in Jerusalem in the mid-1960s, this doesn’t have the broad—or, for that matter, child—appeal of Daniella Carmi’s Samir and Yonatan (2000), but it’s refreshing to have a tale in which the city’s people loom larger than its issues. (Fiction. 11-13)