Blue Mondays

The novel's protagonist - named Arnon, like its author - is a young man on the run: expelled from high school and on the outs with his ailing father, he spends his days and nights living a vagabond's life on the streets of Amsterdam. He falls abjectly in love with a waitress in an Italian restaurant, and sneaks into fancy bars and hotels only to skip out when the check arrives.

Then he begins to visit prostitutes, girls no older or wiser than he is - and his fumbling, guileless, surprisingly tender encounters with them we see the sadness beneath his nonstop comic riffing, and the profound restlessness that drives his search for adventure. The novel's Amsterdam is a place where sex is cheap but love is scarce. Arnon gets by on his cleverness and his sense of humor, and it is these that make Blue Mondays so fresh and entertaining.