An Israeli woman relocates to America on assignment from her tech company. In an attempt to leave her past behind and adapt entirely to the new culture in which she finds herself, she joins her colleagues on a deer hunt, discovering a surprising acumen for the sport. She fires again and again, refining her skills with every shot.
As she embarks on an affair with her hunting guide and colleague, David, she sinks deeper into hunting season, vacillating between predator and prey as the boundaries between man, woman, work, and nature begin to collapse. Hunting with David becomes the one stable aspect of her life until one day everything changes.
With a poet’s eye and a hunter’s aim, Tehila Hakimi’s beguiling debut novelis a taut, twisty story about the everyday violence that haunts countries, and one woman’s tenuous grasp on reality.
‘A fable becoming reality of a woman becoming herself: Tehila Hakimi’s Hunting in America just purely bangs’ – Joshua Cohen, author of THE NETANYAHUS
‘
Sexy, witty, and spare, like an unexpected stranger with whom you might be persuaded to leave a party. Except the party’s in middle America and involves guns
‘ – Elisa Albert, author of HUMAN BLUES AND THE SNARLING GIRL AND OTHER ESSAYS
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This novel exhales a kind of danger. It crackles with tension. Hunting in America is an uncanny, unnerving read. I held my breath to the last brilliant page
‘ – Bea Setton, author of BERLIN
‘A debut that stuns with originality and guile, Tehila Hakimi skillfully weaves a narrative that explores womanhood, the workplace, and the unsettling normalization of violence in both Israel and America. I was caught in the spell of the narrator’s obscure voice from the first paragraph’ – Dorit Rabinyan, author of ALL THE RIVERS
‘In this astonishing debut novel, Tehila Hakimi weaves a darkly seductive tale of alienation and desire and asks hard questions about the sacrifices made and challenges faced by women in a male dominated workplace, revealing the violence inherent in our daily lives. Hakimi’s protagonist straddles the thin line between reality and fantasy, between cultures and languages, between hunting and being hunted. Utterly gripping and chilling in its razor-sharp precision, Hunting in America will leave you breathless’ – Ayelet Tsabari, author of THE ART OF LEAVING AND SONGS FOR THE BROKEN-HEARTED
‘A beautiful, disturbing and thought-provoking book’ – Yedioth Ahronoth
‘Slim, serious, and searching, Hunting in America revolves around some major topics right now: the experience of our inter-country relations, gun usage in [America], and the vacuous void at the centre of one’s quest for power and meaning in America’ – LitHub’s ‘Most Anticipated Books of 2025’
‘Like its protagonist, the book is dark, calculated, unyielding . . . Hakimi manages to distill a sense of violence in the workspace, alongside the violation of nature – both cruelties being the cause for disaster’ – La’Isha
‘[Everything Hakimi] has written was done on the side while she pursued a career as a mechanical engineer. What is even more interesting is the way in which Hakimi’s unique work experience, where she was often the only woman in the workspace, was brought into her literary work. She is gifted with an eagle eye for deciphering the tension and the terror lying just beneath the surface’ – Ha’aretz
‘Hunting in America is chilling and thought provoking. Tehila Hakimi is a skillful hunter’ – Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, author of WAKING LIONS
Tehila Hakimi (Author)
Tehila Hakimi is a Jewish Book Council Award-winning fiction writer and poet. She was a participant in the 2018 Fulbright International Writing Program Fellowship at the University of Iowa, and is a recipient of the 2015 Bernstein Prize for Literature. Hakimi’s short prose and poems have been published in translation in Asymptote, World Literature Today, and The Poetry Review, among others. She was also awarded Israel’s 2019 National Library’s Pardes Scholarship for writers and the 2018 Levi Eshkol Prize for Hebrew Writers.
Joanna Chen (Translator)
Joanna Chen is a British-born writer and literary translator from Hebrew to English whose translations include Agi Mishol’s Less Like a Dove, Yonatan Berg’s Frayed Light (finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards), and Meir Shalev’s My Wild Garden. Her own poetry and writing has appeared in Poet Lore, Mantis, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Narratively, and the Washington Monthly, among other publications. She teaches literary translation at the Helicon School of Poetry in Tel Aviv.
