Abomination

A compelling and compassionate debut about friendship, faith, family and identity.

Melbourne 1999: Ezra and Yonatan are best friends whose lives are forever changed when their school, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Yahel Academy, is rocked by a scandal and they are thrown onto two divergent paths. Twenty years later, the lives of the two men are very different: Ezra identifies as secular and atheist, while Yonatan has been ordained as a rabbi and even teaches at the academy. By chance they are reunited, and the events of their past and present collide with devastating consequences.

Abomination lays bare the clash between religious and secular worlds in contemporary Australia and provides a revealing glimpse into a closed community. With great tenderness and insight debut author Ashley Goldberg tells the story of an enduring and evolving friendship as Yonatan and Ezra struggle to come to terms with the choices they have made, search for meaning, and forge their own identities. This is a beautifully observed, moving story from an exciting young writer.

About the Author

Ashley Goldberg is an Australian writer based in Melbourne. His fiction has appeared in New Australian Fiction 2021, Meanjin, Chiron Review, The Honest Ulsterman and Award Winning Australian Writing among other publications. Ashley has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and a Graduate Diploma of Professional Writing from Canberra University. His work has been shortlisted, longlisted, and anthologized in numerous competitions worldwide, including the 2017/18 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2019, Ashley was a fellow at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre and a finalist for the Tasmanian Writers' Prize. Abomination was shortlisted for the 2020 Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award.