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In this section we'll keep you up to date with news of books you might be interested in. The information will come from the publishers' website and we will add our reviews as often as we can.
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FICTION
Beating for Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg
By Geoff Akers
 The life and achievements of Isaac Rosenberg have steadily come into focus in recent years with new critical editions of the works and substantive biographies. The closure of the Whitechapel Library last year marked by surviving readers and devotees and deplored in the name of its greatest beneficiaries amongst whom Rosenberg figures prominently sets a seal on that career. Flimsy original editions of his poems published by Narodiczky are now offered at several hundreds of pounds. Conferences are planned for later this year.
Geoff Akers, a Scottish academic and writer, well-versed in the poetry of the First World War, has taken Rosenberg’s life (and acknowledging the recent formal biographies amongst his sources) for the subject of a novel. The result is an imaginative and poignant story of the growth of an artist’s mind and the tribulations of a soldier’s career and much is made of the sensitivities of so private a man. It makes vivid reading and when it comes to the poems of the trenches sets them precisely in their context with all the gritty detail of their inspiration having Rosenberg explain his thoughts’ workings to his brothers under fire. The story makes the most of its subject and the book comes with serious endorsements by political heavy weights of today.
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Disobedience
By Naomi Alderman
In suburban north-west London, where leafy avenues wind into the countryside beyond, the Orthodox Jewish community of Hendon quietly conducts its daily life. Hidden from the gaze of outsiders, the faithful live, work, love and pray, with little concern for the sprawling metropolis outside.
But then a beloved rabbi dies, and his passing brings his wayward daughter home. For the past ten years Ronit has been living the life of a modern New York woman; returning home, she's looking forward to catching up with old friends, perhaps settling old scores. But it soon becomes clear that Hendon and Ronit don't fit. Her home has become a more unsettling place than she had anticipated. And when she is reunited with her childhood girlfriend Esti, who has taken a very different path in life, it's not long before the two women are forced to confront their pasts - and to examine the difficult choices they have made.
Disobedience is a brilliant, unputdownable novel that illuminates a culture that has existed in Britain for centuries, yet remains almost entirely hidden. With incredible insight and enduring wit, Naomi Alderman offers a contemporary take on the search for love, faith and understanding in a world filled with conflicting moral and sexual ideals.
Naomi Alderman has won the second Orange Award for New Writers
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Five Amber Beads
By Richard Aronowitz-Mercer
 An accomplished first novel about roots, identity and art.
For his first venture into fiction, Richard Aronowitz has borrowed heavily into his own life. Like him, his main character Charley Bernstein is a researcher specialised in Impressionist and modern painting. Like him, he has translated his great-uncle’s diary from German into English, kept throughout the war while in was in work camps, and he is trying to piece back the dramatic history of his family.
Victim of a traffic accident in New York, Charley meets an old man in hospital. The poor fellow has lost his memory and has been renamed Christopher Street after the place where he was found. He speaks English with a faint accent, is fluent in French, German and Polish and looks 75 or so. They share a room while Charley recovers and Christopher desperately tries to remember his past.
Charley tells him of his own family. How his mother was saved from the Holocaust by the kindertransport and has cut herself off from her German past. He finds out about his great-uncle’s life in the work camps: how he was made block leader, the choices that he had to make, the terrible news he received from the family left in the ghetto; the fears but also the friendship.
Back in England and recovered, Charley is sent on an assignment to Israel to check the provenance of a Modigliani. He decides to bring his girlfriend and Christopher. They first have to get him a fake passport borrowing Charley’s grandfather’s name.
In Israel, Charley meets his great-uncle’s best friend who eventually escaped from the camps with him, bringing back more memories and particularly that of the young German who helped him survive. Christopher is moved by the landscape and emotions are deeply stirred. The questions raised by the Modigliani’s provenance give us a glimpse of the amazing work done by the Looted Art Commission.
A very ambitious debut which brilliantly succeeds in bringing together the themes of identity with fascinating parallels between a nation and an individual’s past and the needs to know one’s roots in order to live. Beautifully written and movingly told, Five Amber Beads is well worth a read.
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Beware of God
By Shalom Auslander
Picador
 Outrageously funny and ferociously intelligent, this collection of stories is centred around a series of surreal and profane conceptions of God. Each story is unmistakably Jewish as are the depictions of God, but in the vein of Philip Roth or even Mel Brooks rather than a more orthodox tradition. God appears in a variety of incarnations; as a chain-smoking mafia boss attempting to keep a hold of the death rate of the world; the voice on the car radio instructing Mr. Schwarzman to build an altar in his back garden. He’s also an overbearing CEO with a marketing strategy, though the jury is still out on whether the slogan ‘The Original and Still the Best’ works, or whether to appeal to a different market with ‘The Porsche of Deities’.
Each tale is more bold and inventive than the next,. Yet Auslander possesses the deft skill of making even the most surreal situations completely plausible, often moving and consistently hilarious –where else would we find an enlightened chimp suffering a bout of existential angst, Doughnut and Danish, the observant god-fearing hamsters, and I won’t even attempt to explain the spiritual rollercoaster boarded when ingesting a Friday night dinner...
There is nothing and no one too sacred for Auslander’s shrewd gaze. This emerges in the most unexpected intertextual references used. These include a myriad of prayers to Holocaust educational rhetoric, the golem tale, the Dead Sea Scrolls... even Charlie Brown and Snoopy are swept up into this uncanny world.
I loved this book –read it and it will make you laugh until it hurts...and in the long run, it’ll do you a lot more good than a bowl of chicken soup.
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Dora B
By Josiane Behmoiras
Bloomsbury
 Josiane Behmoiras tells the moving story of her childhood with her mother Dora, a very loving but profoundly disturbed woman. In a succession of short chapters, each one describing one episode from their lives, she conveys the girl’s helplessness which manifests into a teenager’s frustration at seeing her poor mother gradually lose her grip on the world. It is a tribute to an incredibly brave woman unfairly left to fend for herself and her daughter at a timewhen she was incapable of doing so. This book also serves as an amazing testimony to the courage summoned by Josiane to cut herself off and manage to preserve her sanity at much too high a price.
All that is divulged about Dora is that her family came from Turkey to France and spoke Ladino at home. Most of them were murdered by the Nazis. Josiane’s father disappeared from her mother’s life even before she was born. Dora with her illusions of gentility took on all sorts of jobs but could not really manage to keep them. Arrested a couple of times because they did not have the required one franc to prove they were not vagrants, they were finally expelled to Israel.
Despite their efforts to embracetheir new life in the ma’abara,a makeshift settlement housing new immigrants, but the place quickly turns into a living hell with neighbours taunting Dora and branding her a madwoman. More and more convinced she is the victim of a conspiracy, Dora starts to talk aloud to the microphones supposedly hidden in the wall of their hut.
Josiane tells the story of a life of intense misery with hardly anything to eat, all too frequent aggressions and yet, through it all, her mother’s amazing personality shines through. There is no doubt she loved her daughter, taking her along on her fanciful dreams of a bright future, imagining her on her wedding day, believing in their eventual deserved happiness against all odds.
Unfortunately this was not to be. Although gifted, Josiane was not able to finish school because someone had to earn an income. Eventually, leaving Israel and escaping her mother was her only way to survive, heartrending as it was. Although she tried to arrange for Dora join her in Australia by that stage, too many irrational fears prevented her from doing anything. Dora drifted further from reality, becoming a ‘bag lady’, still managing to find happiness in her freedom. The last pages of the book are incredibly moving.
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Seeds Of Greatness
Jon Canter
Jonathan Cape ISBN 0224077732
 Two friends grow up in a North London Jewish suburb. Jack is wayward and devious and gets expelled from school. David is bright and parent-pleasing and destined for great things. But it's Jack who gets rich and famous as a TV chat-show host, while David earns peanuts working in a Suffolk bookshop.
When Jack dies, his widow and publisher commission David to write Jack's authorised biography. David is a gentle, discreet man who can be relied upon not to dish the dirt about Jack. Or his widow. Or his publisher. David will write what they want - something nice and bland.
But David can't do it. He writes Seeds of Greatness instead. It's the truth about his forty-year friendship with Jack, the man who came to dominate his life. It's got sex and drugs and blackmail and jealousy. It's not what he's been paid to write and he knows it can never be published. David thinks that by writing the truth he'll get Jack out of his system. But he finds he'll never be free of Jack. Jack will be with him for as long as he lives. Jon Canter has perfect pitch. Seeds of Greatness is as funny a novel as you'll ever read.
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The Moldavian Pimp
Edgardo Cozarinsky
Translated by Nick Caistor
Harvill Secker ISBN: 184343234X
In a bar in the Buenos Aires suburb of Villa Crespo our narrator recalls his encounters with an old man of Lithuanian descent, Samuel Warschauer, whom he came to know shortly before the man died. Among his papers, he found the script of a curious play entitled The Moldavian Pimp, performed in Yiddish in the poor, Jewish area of the city in 1927-28. The play concerned young Jewish girls from the Ukraine recruited by Jewish pimps to go to Argentina on the promises of freedom and a new life, only to find themselves sold into prostitution. Set in the Argentine capital and Paris, and ranging in time from the 1920s to the present day, Edgardo Cozarinsky’s beautiful and moving novel about Jewish immigrants may be among the few records we have of an extraordinary and little-known twilight society.
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Dreams of Rescue
Laura Shaine Cunningham
Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747577935
A chilling mystery unfolds on a frozen lake
Why is Juliana always cast as the victim in her films? It’s her eyes: “they widen so nicely in terror.” In movies, she has been stabbed, bludgeoned, and once impaled upon a decorative sword. Now it may be that her once-loving husband is trying to kill her. Or has Juliana become too suggestible?
The elements - a frozen corpse, a stalker and a high-voltage courtroom drama - echo her starring roles, but where are her romantic saviours? The police don’t seem like potential lovers; her lawyer wants her money: life, she discovers, is very different from the movies, especially her own. Even her charming lake resort town turns out to be a façade, hiding a divorce and dysfunction cottage industry.
Taut and beautifully written, Dreams of Rescue turns the female-in-peril story on its head, illuminating the secrets of a dangerous marriage and creating a contemporary tale as powerful as the classics Rebecca and Gaslight.
The Circumcision
Gyorgy Dalos
Translated by Judith Sollosy
Marion Boyars ISBN 0-7145-3123-5
 Twelve-year-old Robi Singer and best friend Gabor Blum are the only boys in their class who have yet to be circumcised. Robi is worried.
‘What if the knife should slip? How will he show himself in front of the others in the showers? Will he find a wife? And is there plastic surgery to fix up damage of this sort?’
So should he have the circumcision? It seems everyone has an opinion – from friends and teachers at the Jewish School, to his eccentric grandmother and hypochondriac mother – but in the end, the final decision is down to Robi…
György Dalos was born in Budapest in 1943. Arrested in 1968 for ‘activities against the state’, he was under a publication ban for the next 19 years. From 1995 to 1999 he was the head of the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin and was the curator for Hungarian literature at the 1999 Frankfurt Book Fair. He now lives in Germany.
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What Happens Now
Jeremy Dyson
Abacus ISBN 0-349-11814-0
 When 15-year-old Alistair Black gets a part in the hit BBC series THEN AND NOW, everyone tells him it will change his life. But the malign historical events depicted in the TV play start to have an effect on the lives of its child stars, and Alistair's so- called 'opportunity' leads him into increasingly dark territory, culminating in a devastating event with far-reaching consequences. Twenty years on and Alistair's co-star, Alice Zealand, is still struggling to live with what happened. Properly and gloriously in love for the first time - but on the verge of losing it - she too must lay her ghosts to rest to claim a life back for herself. With his flair for creating memorable characters and a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, Jeremy Dyson has written a gripping and often very funny debut novel about love, history, fate, fear and the perils and pleasures of the imagination.
Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women
Edited by Jo Glanville
Telegram ISBN 1 84659 011 6
 These fascinating and diverse stories reflect the everyday concerns of Palestinians living under occupation. Writers who were children during the first intifada appear alongside those who remember the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war.
Palestinian women offer compassionate, often critical, insight into their society in times of hardship and turmoil, yet look beyond to the warmth of human relations and the hope that better times will come. The anthology reflects the concerns of Palestinians — from life under occupation to questions of identity. Politics and its impact on individual lives is not the only theme of this fiction, which ranges from the surreal to reportage in style. There are also love stories, poignant reflections on family life and on exile.
Contributors include authors from the occupied territories, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, and writers from the Palestinian Diaspora. They include: Liana Badr, one of the most distinguished Palestinian authors writing today; Adania Shibli, one of the newer and younger voices; Laila Al Atrash, author of many novels and short stories and Naomi Shihab Nye, an acclaimed Palestinian-American writer.
Jo Glanville is a journalist and radio producer with a strong attachment to the Middle East and a particular interest in the history of Palestine and Israel. She lived in the Old City, East Jerusalem, in the mid-90s. Since then she has directed her career towards the Middle East whenever possible.
Satsuma Sun-mover
Adam Green
Lazy Gramophone Press: ISBN 0955253004
A daft but ultimately quite profound tale about the chaotic happenstance which plunges a mild and underweight philosopher into the daring project of a modern day alchemist. Theo Fintwistle, an avid logician and author of computer manuals, is caught in a civil war between two philosophical schools whilst studying at Cambridge. His alumni at the New York Sandwich Institute fly him to exile in New York but he is mistakenly arrested on arrival and thrown into a convict bus which is promptly hijacked leaving him and Spinny 'neuro-boy' Jones to chew the proverbial cud. Very shortly Theo becomes reluctantly embroiled in an attempt to build a psycho-active drug to lift human thought to the more rarefied dimensions in which our holier ancestors once dwelt. Across three continents, at high speed and often in perilous accommodation, Theo soon embarks on a desperate attempt to gather the vital ingredients to save human thought from reaching a state of total and immovable boredom. An unholy blend of high brow philosophy and square wheeled vans.
Adverbs
Daniel Handler
Fourth Estate ISBN 0-00-718127-2
 Adverbs marks the return of Daniel Handler to adult fiction as he tackles life's most complicated and compelling noun: love. In a series of intersecting narratives that explore variations of that ineffable feeling, Handler crafts a moving and shifting story exploring the frustrating glory of this most troublesome of emotions.
Two friends, one dying and one lonely; an adolescent's first homosexual stirrings for his sister's boyfriend; a doomed, enormously inappropriate tryst between a taxi driver and his passenger; a high-school crush that falls painfully short of a movie projected on a grungy screen. Handler's characters experience love in all of its dark, triumphant, devastating and sneaky forms. In Adverbs, Daniel Handler reveals to us how the most universal of themes is also the most unknown.
'Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner. We breathed it in, particularly me.'
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The World to Come
Dara Horn
Hamish Hamilton ISBN 0241143497
An intoxicating novel that will take you back into the past, deep into the present and forwards into a meaningful future
A million-dollar Chagall painting is stolen during a singles’ event at a New York museum. The painting has an unusual history, and there is an unlikely thief – Benjamin Ziskind, a lonely former child prodigy who now writes questions for TV shows and who believes the painting once belonged to his family.
Benjamin’s moment of apparent madness in stealing the painting is just one such moment in a web of riveting stories. For him, for his family and for Chagall, life is a breathtaking collision course of past, present and future, and ‘the world to come’ starts right now.
Dara Horn was born in New Jersey in 1977 and now lives in New York City. She is the author of In the Image, which won the National Jewish Book Award, The Edward Lewis Wallant Award and the Reform Judaism Prize for Fiction.
This is an absolutely magical book. Dara Horn tells the enthralling story of three generations from the Russia of pogroms to today’s New York, interspersed with Yiddish tales, the Vietnam war and Chernobyl. Her novel is full of humanity, longing for a lost world and hope for the one to come. Highly recommended.
Geraldine D’Amico
Kalooki Nights
Howard Jacobson
Jonathan Cape ISBN: 0224078658
Life should have been sunny for Max Glickman, growing up in Crumpsall Park in peacetime, with his mother’s glamorous card evenings to look forward to, and photographs of his father’s favourite boxers on the walls. But other voices whisper seductively to him of Buchenwald, extermination, and the impossibility of forgetting.
Fixated on the crimes which have been committed against his people, but unable to live among them, Max moves away, marries out, and draws cartoon histories of Jewish suffering in which no one, least of all the Jews, is much interested. But it’s a life. Or it seems a life until Max’s long-disregarded childhood friend, Manny Washinsky, is released from prison. Little by little, as he picks up his old connection with Manny, trying to understand the circumstances in which he made a Buchenwald of his own home, Max is drawn into Manny’s family history – above all his brother’s tragic love affair with a girl who is half German. But more than that, he is drawn back into the Holocaust obsessions from which he realises there can be, and should be, no release.
There is wild, angry, even uproarious laughter in this novel, but it is laughter on the edge. It is the comedy of cataclysm.
Matches
By Alan Kaufman
Constable
 “Matches” is the Israel Defence Force codename for a soldier. Among the troops, it has come to mean someone who strikes, burns and dies.”
The author, Alan Kaufman, is an American poet who made aliyah, leaving the comfort and safety of New York for life in Israel. He has based his novel on his own experience and that of his friends serving as reservists in the Gaza Strip. The result is a powerful book, both captivating and disturbing, which shows the profound impact of an ongoing conflict which has no victors, only victims.
His main character Nathan Falk is an American who keeps having to justify his presence to his comrades who don’t have the luxury of an easy exit to a safe country. He shows the conflictsbetween the men but the strong friendships also –interactions played out through frenzied games of Risk to forget about the real battles they have to fight on a daily basis.
His, like that of all soldiers is a double life; one day a civilian leading a normal existence, the next a soldier surrounded by possible enemies who would not hesitate to kill you and hate you in a way you never thought could be possible. The two existences are not contained but are instead translated into a passionate and guilt-ridden affair with the wife of a friend.
Alan Kaufman conveys the fear and the damage done to the soul of these men. They are not the glorious soldiers of Israel’s early days. His writing is urgent and direct, not polished and refined, he shoots from the hip on paper just as he had to do in combat; both are survival tactics. This is a book written by a Jew who deeply believes and loves Israel but whose beliefs and love of the country were dramatically tested.
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All My Friends Are Superheroes
By Andrew Kaufman
Telegram
 This quirky little book is an absolute delight: funny, surprising and poetic all in one.
Tom is not a superhero. All his friends are. And he has married one: the Perfectionist. Unfortunately for him, on the day of their wedding, one of her ex-boyfriends, Hypno, still in love and jealous, has hypnotised her into not seeing Tom. They have now been married for six months but the Perfectionist thinks Tom has left her. She is miserable. He is desperate to make himself seen.
She has decided to rebuild her life on the other side of Canada. Waiting to board a flight from Toronto to Vancouver, Tom has to make himself visible to the Perfectionist before they land or all will be lost.
The novel goes back and forth between the present desperate hours when Tom is trying to break Hypno’s spell and the story of the disastrous six months of their marriage, interspersed with flashbacks from before that period and wonderful little vignettes describing Tom’s various superheroes friends.
These have nothing in common with Spiderman or Superman. They were all introduced to Tom by the Amphibian, a creature Tom saved whilst cleaning a swimming-pool. There is the Shadowless Man who was abandoned by his shadow one morning, the Businessman who calculates continuously or the Impossible Man who has realised the impossibility of all his dreams. Then there is the Clock who can travel in time, the Sloth who doesn’t care about anything, the Inverse who reveals the exact opposite of your life when you shake his hand and many others, all more inventive than the next. But in this world, there are no villains.
I won’t say if Tom manages to make himself seen by the Perfectionist in the end. Suffice to say that love is probably the greatest superpower of all and that this is a charming book in the vein of Boris Vian, a book to enjoy and dream about. What would be your superpower?…
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The Attack
Yasmina Khadra
Translated from the French by John Cullen
Heineman ISBN 043401558X
 Dr. Amin Jaafari, an Israeli Arab, is a surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. Dedicated to his work, respected and admired by his colleagues and community, he represents integration at its most successful. He has learned to live with the violence and chaos that plague his city, and on the night of a deadly bombing in a local restaurant, he works tirelessly to help the shocked and shattered patients brought to the emergency room. But this night of turmoil and death takes a horrifyingly personal turn. His wife’s body is found among the dead, with massive injuries, the police coldly announce, typical of those found on the bodies of fundamentalist suicide bombers. As evidence mounts that his wife, Sihem, was responsible for the catastrophic bombing, Dr. Jaafari is torn between cherished memories of their years together and the inescapable realization that the beautiful, intelligent, thoroughly modern woman he loved had a life far removed from their comfortable, assimilated existence together.
From the graphic, shocking description of the bombing that opens the novel to its searing conclusion, The Attack portrays the reality of terrorism and its incalculable spiritual costs. Intense and humane, devoid of political bias, hatred, and polemic, intensely thoughtful, sensitive and felt, it displays a profound understanding of what can seem impossible to understand.
This is a fascinating read, disturbing at times, but highly recommended. Yasmina Khadra, his real name Mohammed Moulessehoul, a former high ranking officer in the Algerian army, in charge of fighting terrorism, is exploring Muslim fanaticism. He casts a different light on a complex and frightening situation. Geraldine D’Amico
Seven Days to the Sea
Rebecca Kohn
Michael Joseph ISBN: 0141020512
 In the bestselling tradition of The Red Tent comes a novel about Moses' flight from Egypt.
The acclaimed author of The Gilded Chamber has written an enchanting novel about the Exodus, narrated by Miryam, the sister of Moses, and by his lover, Tzipporah. These two women weave an intricate and unforgettable tale of love, envy, selflessness and devotion, all of it revolving around one, exceptional man.
But could Moses have become the inspirational leader he was without these women at his side? Rebecca Kohn takes one of the best-loved episodes from the Bible and brings it startlingly to life. Miryam and Tzipporah tell a story that will make you laugh and cry, that will uplift and entrance you from first page to last.
Reuben Sachs
Amy Levy
Preface by Julia Neuberger
Persephone Books ISBN 1903155126
 This 1888 novel is about a couple who love each other, but his political ambitions demand money and she is poor: Reuben Sachs would be a fairly standard late-Victorian novel about the cruelty of the marriage market if it were not imbued with feminist polemic - Amy Levy (1861-89) was sharply critical of the empty lives led by women with, nothing to do all day except gossip, play cards and go shopping.
The setting is the Anglo-Jewish community in Bayswater, portrayed with a sardonic gaze that shocked contemporary readers. Yet the author's theme was broader, for she was in part reacting against Daniel Deronda: she believed that George Eliot had romanticised her Jewish characters and that no novelist had yet described the modern Jew with 'his surprising virtues and no less surprising vices.'
Oscar Wilde observed: 'Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make Reuben Sachs, in some sort, a classic'; Julia Neuberger writes in her Preface, 'This is a novel about women, and Jewish women, about families, and Jewish families, about snobbishness, and Jewish snobbishness'; while in the Independent on Sunday Lisa Allardice said: 'Sadder but no less sparkling than Miss Pettigrew, Reuben Sachs is another forgotten classic by an accomplished female novelist. Amy Levy might be described as a Jewish Jane Austen'.
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The Romance of a Shop
Amy Levy
Edited by Susan David Bernstein
Broadview Press ISBN 1551115662
 The Romance of a Shop is an early "New Woman" novel about four sisters, who decide to establish their own photography business and their own home in central London after their father's death and their loss of financial security. In this novel, Amy Levy examines both the opportunities and dangers of urban experience for women in the late nineteenth century who pursue independent work rather than follow the established paths of domestic service. By outfitting her characters as photographers, Levy emphasizes the importance of the gendered gaze in this narrative of the modern city.
This Broadview edition prints for the first time since the 1880s Levy's essay on Christina Rossetti and a short story set in North London, both published in Oscar Wilde's magazine The Woman's World. Other appendices include poetry by Levy, Michael Field, Dollie Radford, and A. Mary F. Robinson, and essays on Victorian photography, literary realism, "the woman question" at the end of the nineteenth century, and the plight of women working in London.
Susan David Bernstein is a Professor of English, Jewish Studies, and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
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Gael
Judith Mok
Telegram ISBN 1 84659 006 X
 A young Jewish violinist from Holland falls hopelessly in love with an Irish
painter called Gael. She leaves her aristocratic husband in Paris, marries
Gael and moves to Ireland, where they have one son.
But her refined upper-class background hasn't prepared her for the poverty
of life with Gael, nor for his brutish behaviour. She also encounters anti-Semitic
sentiments in Ireland, and struggles to reconcile this with her past, and that
of her parents in particular, who are Holocaust survivors. Her desperate attempts
to maintain a semblance of normal family life while still pursuing her career
become more and more impossible as Gael grows increasingly delusional and violent.
This is at once a moving love story and a brutal portrayal of a destructive
marriage that comes to a devastating end.
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Over Exposure
Hugo Rifkind
Canongate ISBN 1841958581
When a shadowy cat-burglar called 'Fingers' starts nicking rocks from London's celebrities, Macaulay Lewis, a misfit news-hound, scents opportunity. If he can unmask the thief, he might just stand a chance of holding down his job with the paper. His ex-girlfriend might fancy him again. He might even get snapped by the odd celeb magazine himself. Fame glitters. But is all that glitters really worth the cab ride home?
Overexposure is arch farce and rollicking thriller rolled into one, with unforgettable characters, brilliant dialogue and laugh-out-loud quips. Expose yourself to the flashiest, edgiest comedy of modern life in recent years.
Everyman
Philip Roth
Jonathan Cape ISBN: 0224078690
 Dazzling. The most exciting novelist writing today. Independent
on Sunday
Philip
Roth’s twenty-seventh book takes its title
from an anonymous fifteenth-century English allegorical play whose drama
centres on the summoning of the living to death and whose hero, Everyman,
is intended to be the personification of mankind. The fate of Roth’s
Everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on
the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers and during his hospitalisation
as a nine-year-old surgical patient through the crises of health that
come close to killing him as a vigorous adult, and into his old age,
when he is undone by the death and deterioration of his contemporaries
and relentlessly stalked by his own menacing physical woes. A successful
commercial advertising artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father
of two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him, the beloved
brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter
envy, and the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom
he’s made a mess of marriage.
Everyman is a painful human story of the regret
and loss and stoicism of a man who becomes what he does not want to be.
The terrain of this savagely sad short novel is the human body, and its
subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.
Magnificent.
Roth is writing the best books of his life. He captures better than
anyone the collision of public and private, the intrusion of history
into the skin, the pores of every individual alive. Guardian
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The Wise Virgins
Leonard Woolf
Preface by Lyndall Gordon
Persephone Books ISBN 1903155339
 The Wise Virgins (1913) is a semi-autobiographical novel about a dilemma: whether Harry, the hero, should go into the family business and marry the suitable but dull girl next door or move in artistic circles and marry one of the entrancing 'Lawrence' girls. For, as Lyndall Gordon writes: 'It is a truth widely acknowledged that Camilla Lawrence is a portrait of the author's wife - Virginia Woolf.' This is one reason why the novel is so intriguing. But it is also a Forsterian social comedy, funny, perceptive, highly intelligent, full of clever dialogue and at times bitterly satirical; while the dramatic and emotional dénouement still retains a great deal of its power to shock.
It was on his honeymoon in 1912 that Leonard Woolf began writing his second (and final) novel. He was 31, newly returned from seven years as a colonial administrator, and asking himself much the same questions as his hero. Helen Dunmore wrote in The Sunday Times: 'It's a passionate, cuttingly truthful story of a love affair between two people struggling against the prejudices of their time and place. Woolf's writing is almost unbearably honest.'
A Woman in Jerusalem
A. B. Yehoshua
Peter Halban Books ISBN: 1 870015 98 3
 A suicide bomb explodes in a Jerusalem market. One of the victims is a migrant worker without any papers, only a salary slip from the bakery where she worked as a night cleaner. As her body lies unclaimed in the morgue, her employers are labelled unfeeling and inhuman by a local journalist. The manager of human resources is given the task of discovering who she was and why she had come to Jerusalem.
As the image of this once-beautiful dead woman begins to obsess him, the manager turns this duty into a personal mission – he is no longer just saving his company’s reputation by trying to discover her identity and assure her of a dignified funeral. He is now restoring her not only to her family and country but also to common humanity – whilst at the same time conquering the hardness of his own heart.
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