Our Speakers Recommend

Michael Arditti: Joseph Roth’s Job is my favourite biblical retelling.

Nina Caplan: Mavis Gallant's Selected Stories, published by Bloomsbury. it contains a story called The Latehomecomer which is one of the most thought provoking pieces of WW2 fiction I've ever read. It's from the german point of view, which for anyone steeped in the jewish take on things, is extremely interesting to discover.

Amanda Craig: Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise - not just because of its tragic history, but because of what the author was doing, which was to write a masterly Tolstoyan novel for the 20th century about a variety of people, right up to the moment that the Holocaust caught up with her. I think it's tremendously important for novelists to bear witness to contemporary events and to make them into art - even if this has of late become very unfashionable in the current British obsession with the past, nostalgic or otherwise.

Esther David:One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Strange Case of Billy Biswas by Arun Joshi, Shame by Salman Rushdie, Aphrodite by Isabel Allende, Jazz by Toni Morrison, A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz.

Julia Franck: Summertime by Coetzee, Tirza by Arnon Grunberg (who is jewish, living partly in Amsterdam partly in New York - but only a few of his novels are translated so far to english - dutch is original, and most of his books are translated to a lot of other languages), Atemschaukel by Herta Müller, David Grossman's wonderful intense new novel and Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri as well as Children's Book by AS Byatt. If only one I should go for Grunberg since I think it really deserves a good english translation.

Anthony Julius: Anna Karenina; Lady Chatterley's Lover;

The Guide for the Perplexed

Eric Kaufmann: Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

(1976) and Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986)

Etgar Keret: I really liked No One Belongs Here More than You by

Miranda July. I was shortlisted with her a couple of years ago to the

O'Connor prize and we met in Cork (her book won). I loved her book and

she liked mine which, of course, made me appreciate her intelligence

and great taste in literature too ...

Simon Kuper: Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

Adam LeBor: The Stieg Larsson Trilogy, for their inspiring combination of complex political conspiracies and enthralling story telling. a model indeed....

Norman Lebrecht: Victor Sebestyen's 1989 - a terrific piece of internal pathology on the collpase of communism.

Simon Mawer: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani. Exquisitely beautiful and painful. For non-Italian readers, it's available as a Penguin Classic in a recent English translation. Another oblique look at the fate of European Jews - much more oblique in the book than in the beautiful-looking de Sica film, from which Bassani distanced himself for this and other reasons.

Steven Pinker: Daniel Goldhagen’s new book on genocide, Worse than War. I also recently enjoyed James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible.

Claudia Roden: In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh

Norman Rose: But He Was Good To His Mother by Robert A. Rockaway (Gefen Book, New York, 2000), a startling account of the rise and fall of the Jewish Mafia in the United States.

Anne Sebba: Amos Oz' A Tale of Love and Darkness ( the best book I

have read about becoming a writer, being a parent and the birth of the

State of Israel); Martin Goodman's Rome and Jerusalem ( this complete

ly transformed my understanding of the Ancient Relationship with

important consequences today ) and two books about growing up:  

Frankie and Stankie by Barbara Trapido - a deeply touching memoir

about growing up in South Africa and Family Romance by John

Lanchester, about learning to understand his parents and especially

his mother's secret earlier life as a nun.

Will Self: Albert Speer; His Struggle with the Truth by Gitta Sereny - I've just read it for the third time.

Michelene Wandor: The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt.

Avivah Zornberg: Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, M.D., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History.