Israeli writer David Grossman is tired of foreign journalists charging his fiction with political meaning. When Grossman was in Milan last year to promote his latest work, Her Body Knows, a critic put it to him that his jealous hero’s broken leg symbolised the crippled Zionist dream. “I was infuriated,” Grossman says. "It's such an insult, not only for my literature, but also for everything that comes out of Israel that is a little more complicated than the last headlines of CNN. I told him that even though we are Israelis, we have the right to be jealous."

Jealousy is the thread that unifies the two novellas of Her Body Knows. The first piece, Frenzy, tells of Shaul, a middle-aged civil servant, convinced that his wife is having an affair. As his sister-in-law Esti drives him across the country in pursuit of his wife, Shaul reconstructs the details of a liaison which, as Esti increasingly realises, might be entirely of his imagining.

Frenzy probes the relationship between jealousy and creativity. "We have to fantasise when we are jealous," Grossman says. "We are always sure that the people we're jealous of are glowing with love. The sex that they have is always sharp and daring and sweet." For Grossman, this creative empowerment explains why people are often perversely reluctant to overcome their torment: "When they are jealous, even the driest people become artists with the sharpest colours and smells."

Frenzy reveals the self-loathing behind jealous fantasies, what Grossman terms our "strange need to be humiliated". As he explains, "We create the paradise for the two lovers, only to expel ourselves from it."

Grossman acknowledges certain political dimensions to the story, the most obvious being the need to view conflict from the perspective of the other. Alone with Shaul in the car, Esti is brought into unmediated contact with "the chaos that is radiating from the other". "We're much better at penetrating the body than the soul," says Grossman. "There's a point where we're very hesitant to cross. Esti will embrace the chaos of Shaul's soul in a way that is very rare. She is doing something courageous and generous."

The second novella, In Another Life, is as much about the challenge of embracing the body as the soul. The story concerns Rotem, a troubled expatriate writer in London who returns to Israel to read her latest story aloud to her dying mother, Nili. Rotem's story dramatises a still-raw episode from her childhood - when Nili deserted her children to search for a 15-year-old former student with whom she had initiated an erotic relationship.

Grossman ventures into the "loaded, condensed human zone" of the relationships between women and their mothers: "I wanted to go into this place that is almost blocked for me." Rotem's imagined re-creation of her mother's affair lingers in an ill-defined space between fiction and memory. At one point, Rotem insists, "I have to hear now if anything I've been babbling is even a little bit close to reality." Nili elusively responds, "It's exactly the reality I want to hear."

Underpinning In Another Life is Grossman's belief that fiction and reality are siblings rather than opposites. "I hardly can tell the difference," he says. "Just think of how much of life consists of dreams, day dreams, wishful thinking, hallucinations, what-ifs and nightmares. Israel was created because of the vision and imagination and sometimes illusions of not very many people at the end of the 19th century. I create imaginary sit-uations, sometimes on the edge of being far-fetched, and show how real they can be."

The premise of In Another Life occurred to Grossman five years ago when he started practising yoga, and became aware of parts of his body that had been mute to him before. "I wanted to create a story where the body had a voice," he says. "I wanted the reader to feel something very physical. There are so many sensations we do not feel because we have no words for them. If you do not have the language to describe something, it risks fading out."

While eschewing crude political readings of his work, Grossman insists that the very creation of fiction in Israel is a political act. "The government, the army and the media have an interest in creating us into a mob," he says. "This reality violates the intimate and confiscates individuality. To write a novel is my protest. I put enormous effort into making every individual special and unique." For Her Body Knows, Grossman dusted out references to contemporary politics because he "wanted to explore the themes [of intimacy] that we are deprived of because of 'the situation'”.

Grossman began writing Her Body Knows shortly after the onset of the second intifada. Amid the wave of terrorist attacks, he struggled to forge a protected psychological space in which to concentrate on his fiction. "It was quite an obstacle," he says. "I had to create my own privacy and detach myself from reality. But every siren immediately drew me to the radio."

His enduring obsession with the transformations of youth remains evident in Her Body Knows. The hurts of childhood and adolescence are never far beneath the surface of his characters' psyches.

Grossman's interest in childhood crystallised two decades ago, when he put his then three-year-old son to bed. It was December 21, as he explained to his son, the longest night of the year. In the morning his son burst into his parents' room, crying: "It's over. Daddy, Mummy, this night is over." "Only then did I realise how difficult it was for him, how frightening, because for him it was not taken for granted that the sun will rise again," says Grossman. "In my novels I want to return to a time where everything is still possible and melts."

Writing fiction, for Grossman, is like revisiting this space where everything is possible. He knows almost nothing about a book when he first sets to work on it, the story only congealing in the final stages of writing. "I'm always afraid that it will bore me if I know the end," he says. "I need my story to surprise me, betray me, take me to places I'm afraid to go usually. Even if I want to write something very short, the story starts to act like a cunning carpet-merchant. It unrolls and unfolds dozens of colourful carpets, and I'm tempted very easily."

The paperback edition of Her Body Knows will be published in July by Picador USA