Fiction

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.
Do also look out for events information and keep us posted if you are an organiser.

Refusal

Soazig Aaron

Translated by Barbara Bray

Harvill Secker ISBN ISBN: 1843431653

July 2007

This moving and profoundly truthful story is told in the form of diary, kept by Angélika, the sister-in-law and friend of Klara, who, after her release from Auschwitz, wandered through war-ravaged Europe for two months before returning to Paris in August 1945.

Gradually, over a period of six weeks, Klara reveals, with cold anger and pitiless lucidity, the full horror of what she experienced in Auschwitz as she struggles to readapt to normal life.

Not since Sophie’s Choice has a novelist succeeded in conveying – with truth, dignity, power and intelligence – the inhumanity of the death camps and the scars suffered by those who survived them.

A gift from heaven, a marvel of good writing, an unashamed and inventive approximation to the unbearable weight of memory. I have been waiting for some time for an account like Refusal. I did not expect this quality and had not dared hope for it… Soon only fiction – that is the paradox, the mystery of literature – will be able to not merely bring to life, but also enrich this memory. Jorge Semprun  Nouvel Observateur

A must read! GDA

A Simple Story

S.Y. Agnon

Syracuse University Press ISBN 978-0815606185

Originally published in Hebrew 50 years ago, this is the not-so-simple story of a bygone time and place, about passion and the wisdom of community. The author asserts his values of community in a story rich in biblical allusion and redolent of the society in which he was raised.

The first Hebrew writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of the central figures in modern Hebrew fiction, his works deal with the conflict between traditional Jewish life and the modern world, and attempts to recapture the fading traditions of the European shtetl, or township.

Beating for Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg
By Geoff Akers

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.

Disobedience
Naomi Alderman

Penguin

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

Mere Anarchy

Woody Allen

Ebury Press ISBN 0091920213
July 2007

I am greatly relieved that the universe is finally explainable. I was beginning to think it was me.’ Thus begins ‘Strung Out’, Woody Allen’s hilarious application of the laws of the universe to daily life. Mere Anarchy, Woody Allen’s first new collection in 25 years, features 18 witty, wild and intelligent comic pieces – nine of which have never before been in print.

Surreal, absurd, rich in verbal play, bitingly satirical and just plan daft, this collection includes tales of a body double - mistaken for the film’s star - kidnapped by outlaws; a pretentious writer forced to work on the novelisation of a Three Stooges film; a nanny secretly writing an exposé of her Manhattan employers; crooks selling bespoke prayers on ebay; and how to react when you’re asked to finance a Broadway play about the invention and manufacture of the adjustable showerhead.

Laced with his unique brand of humour and reminiscent of some of his finest films, Mere Anarchy is an essential collection of tales by the inimitable Woody Allen.

Five Amber Beads
Richard Aronowitz-Mercer

Flambard Press

Five Amber Beads is the story of two men whose lives are woven together as they seek to discover the truth about their pasts.

Charley Bernstein works in the London art world and is tracing a family history erased by the Holocaust. In his possession is a diary written by a relative in a labour camp during the Third Reich, and Charley must follow the threads leading from its haunting pages to his own present.

In New York an old man, Christopher, is found lying semiconscious on the pavement. There are no witnesses to what has happened to him and he has no form of identification. When he wakes up in a hospital bed he finds he doesn't recognise the city or his own skin. In a state of total amnesia, he must embark on a struggle to regain his memory.

When fate brings these two men together they find themselves linked by a unique friendship. Their journey takes them from America to the Middle East and England in an enthralling and moving novel that addresses the nature of identity and belonging.

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.

Read this book 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.

Dora B
By Josiane Behmoiras

Bloomsbury

It is 1961 in Montpelier, France. Dora and her eight-year-old daughter Josiane have been arrested, unable to provide on demand the one franc coin to prove - according to the law - that they are not vagrants. To the detective that holds her identity papers in his hand, the solution is simple. They are penniless, unwanted, itinerant and Jewish: they must be shipped back to The Promised Land.

And so Dora and Josiane begin their new life in Israel — a place of warm sand-dunes and sweet oranges, of pomegranate juice and of mint tea poured from silver teapots. But this fresh start comes at a price. Dora, always convinced that she is the victim of some kind of conspiracy, fretfully searches for the tiny microphones that she believes monitor her every word, and rages at an imaginary enemy. Her neighbours, always hostile, begin to persecute her openly for her foreign-ness and her eccentricity. As she tries to create a home of their tiny asbestos hut, their few possessions begin to disappear. Worse are the cat-calls in the street and the constant threat of physical violence. Ostracized from their community, Dora and her daughter face the world together.

Dora B is the story of Josiane’s struggle to come to terms with the truth: that the mother who has so cherished and protected her is losing her grasp on the world. Full of warmth, humour and heartbreak, it is a portrait of an inspiring and unusual woman and a testament to a mother’s selfless love.

Away

Amy Bloom

Granta ISBN 978186207 9700

Away is the extraordinary story of young Lillian Leyb. Her family destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way. In 1920s New York she is taken under the wing of Mr Reuben Burstein, the famous Impresario and his matinee-idol son Meyer. But then her wily cousin Raisele arrives with some unexpected news about Lillian's young daughter Sophie. Driven by a wild hope, Lillian sets off on an odyssey across America, travelling from New York's Lower East Side to Seattle's Skid Row and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail towards Siberia.

Amy Bloom's first novel for eight years revitalises the American road trip novel, from the perspective of a vulnerable but spirited woman. It paints a vivid, earthy and surprising picture of 1920s America, its smells and textures, its population of drifters and con artists, pimps and prostitutes.

Away is storytelling at its finest – epic in sweep, but intimate and psychologically acute, moving but unsentimental. Like the novels of Sarah Waters, it is both richly authentic in its period detail, and fresh and contemporary in its style. But above all Bloom has created an unforgettable character in Lillian Leyb – her voice, haunted/damaged yet innocent, passionate, witty and unpretentious, is so believable and strong that her presence lingers long after the novel ends.

This is Isaac Bashevis Singer meets Cynthia Ozick ... a masterpiece of construction, which does that rare thing: it moves the reader from knowledge and feeling about its characters, into real caring. No higher estimate exists of the writer's art"
— Tom Adair, The Scotsman

“An urgent, riveting, fabulously entertaining road trip of a novel, AWAY grabs you by the throat from the first page to the last, breaks your heart and shakes all your senses awake”
— Emma Donaghue

A truly wonderful and original novel rich in history,both funny and sad but ultimately extremely moving in its humanity and generosity. GDA

The Last Testament

Sam Bourne

HarperCollins ISBN 978-0-00-720333-8

July 2007

April 2003: as the Baghdad Museum of Antiquities is looted, a teenage Iraqi boy finds an ancient clay tablet in a long-forgotten vault. He takes it and runs off into the night …

Several years later, at a peace rally in Jerusalem, the Israeli prime minister is about to sign a historic deal with the Palestinians. A man approaches from the crowd and seems to reach for a gun – bodyguards shoot him dead. But in his hand was a note, one he wanted to hand to the prime minister.

The shooting sparks a series of tit-for-tat killings which could derail the peace accord. Washington sends for trouble-shooter and peace negotiator Maggie Costello, after she thought she had quit the job for good. She follows a trail that takes her from Jewish settlements on the West Bank to Palestinian refugee camps, where she discovers the latest deaths are not random but have a distinct pattern. All the dead men are archaeologists and historians – those who know the buried secrets of the ancient past.

Menaced by fanatics and violent extremists on all sides, Costello is soon plunged into high-stakes international politics, the worldwide underground trade in stolen antiquities and a last, unsolved riddle of the Bible.

This follows the hugely successful Righteous Men also written by Jonathan Freedland under the pen-name of Sam Bourne.

A Short Gentleman

Jon Canter
Jonathan Cape  ISBN 9780224077743

When Robert Purcell, aged eight, read his father's entry in Who’s Who, he saw his own life unfolding before him. Like his father, he’d get a first in Law, then enjoy a distinguished career as a barrister and a judge. For a long time, everything went to plan. Then his life fell apart. He committed a crime. He went to prison.

Now he’s out, his wife has told him to write an account of who he is and why he is who he is. What drove him to his crime? To an English gentleman who loathes the confessional culture such emotional striptease is torture. Nevertheless, A Short Gentleman is that confession. An intellectual giant but an emotional pygmy, Robert struggles to come to terms with the forces that brought him down: Elizabeth, the wife who wanted him to change, Judy Page, the ex-girlfriend who came back to haunt him, Pilkington, the childhood bully who grew into an adult bully, Mike Bell, the old friend Robert was always happy to patronise. Finally, there’s his father, who proved, at the end of his life, not to be the man Robert thought he was.

Despite everything, Robert remains heroically determined to carry on being the same magnificently pompous and self-righteous man he always was, utterly resistant to therapy, change and the emotional demands of the opposite sex.

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 writeJack'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 Song Before it is Sung

Justin Cartwright

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747583417

On July 20, 1944, Adolf Hitler escaped death when an assassin's bombfailed to kill him in his Eastern command, the Wolf's lair. The conspirators were hunted down and hanged from meathooks. Their executions were filmed.

Among those hanged was Axel von Gottberg, who had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Sixty years after his death, his close friend of those days Elya Mendel leaves a legacy of papers and letters to former student Conrad Senior. With the legacy comes a mysterious duty to unravel the past.

The novel is based on the real story of Isaiah Berlin's friendship with Adam von Trott zu Solz.

"Apparently random, even clashing, plot threads are woven together to form a stunning overall design.  He’s a great tale-spinner, a superb craftsman of characters … in this extraordinary novel another major theme is the connection between atheism and morality.  What keeps a man like the fictional Axel von Gottberg, and the real Adam von Trott, defiantly brave in the face of total meaninglessness and personal annihilation?  What explains the blank evil of a man like Hitler? Long after closing this complex, gripping book, you will be still be pondering those questions.” Suzi Feay, Books Quarterly

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Michael Chabon

Fourth Estate ISBN 978-0-00-715039-7

June 2007

For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a 'temporary' safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful and complex frontier city that moves to the Yiddish beat. Now, after sixty years of federal neglect, the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown.

But homicide detective Meyer Landsman has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster.

He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life – and also his worst nightmare. And then someone's got the nerve to commit a murder in the flophouse Landsman calls home. Out of habit, obligation and a half-cocked shot at redemption, he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, and soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil and salvation that are his heritage – and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears.

Gentlemen of the Road

Hodder & Stoughton ISBN 9780340953549

November 2007

Gentlemen of the Road is set in the Kingdom of Arran, in the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, A.D. 950. It tells the tale of two wandering adventurers and unlikely soulmates, variously plying their trades as swords for hire, horse thieves and con artists - until fortune entangles them in the myriad schemes and battles that follow a bloody coup in the medieval Jewish empire of the Khazars. Hired as escorts for a fugitive prince, they quickly find themselves half-willing generals in a mad rebellion, struggling to restore the prince`s family to the throne. As their increasingly outrageous exploits unfold, they encounter a wondrous elephant, wily Rhadanite tradesmen, whores, thieves, soldiers, an emperor, and discover the truth about their young royal charge.

The Brodsky Touch

Lana Citron

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747580423

The Brodsky Touch — opposite of  Midas — where  everything one touches turns to shit.
Issy Brodsky is back with a vengeance   - albeit not even her own.  Agent provocateur and lone parent  of Max, Issy Brodsky is a woman on a mission...   this time to make it  as stand up comic … Superstardom  beckons but  it’s a  rocky road to success and there’s much to contend  with; the ties of motherhood, day job, undermining boyfriend, a nemesis, (the  younger, prettier  stand up),  not to mention the odd psycho...

The sequel to the Honey Trap, "A frenetic and intelligent farce that captures the warped mindset of the frazzled mother. Funny and  Vivacious."  Independent

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.

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 maybe 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 finaldecision is down to Robi…

Gyorgy 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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Maynard & Jennica

Rudolph Delson

FourthEstate ISBN 978-0007252213

October 2007

Maynard Gogarty is bored, with what he's not quite sure, but he's definitely bored. He's a tweed-suit-wearing, perennially glum thirty something living in a Manhattan flat secretly paid for by his crabby grandmother, and is nursing a short film career that shows no signs of development. Plus he's misanthropic and an unhappy dilettante – a real catch. But recently he's turned over a new leaf: he's decided, whatever befalls him, he's going to be happy.

Enter Jennica Green, who seems to have it all: a Princeton graduate with a high-paying city job and her own apartment. But then again, she's the kind of girl who spends two weeks organising a trip to a county fair, which might explain why she is single and looks like remaining so. When Maynard glimpses this Jewish Bridget Jones on a blazingly hot subway ride, what are the odds…?

Set either side of 9/11, Maynard and Jennica's courtship is narrated by our heroes and their many, many observers, among them all four parents (three living), a Russian-German-Israeli scam artist (and Maynard's current wife), a rapper with a linguistics background, a macaw, and an adolescent trumpeter. On the face of it, ‘Maynard & Jennica’ is about many things: a tree homicide, New York City's real estate boom, hip-hop sampling, the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, the Jewish intermarriage crisis, subway emergency brake etiquette, the tournament rules of scrabble, the naming of cats. At its heart though, this brilliant first novel with its menagerie of voices is a simple love story, as touching as it is hilarious.

Rudy Delson lives in Brooklyn, New York. ‘Maynard and Jennica’ is his first book. He forms part of a whole new generation of young and edgy New York writers on the rise. His work will appeal to fans of Joshua Ferris, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer. The film rights were optioned by Scott Rudin, producer of The Hours, Wonder Boys, and The Queen.

Chez Moi

Agnes Desarthe

Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter

Portobello Books ISBN 9781846271014 

April 2008

How hard can it be to run a restaurant when you've fed fussy children and been a circus caterer? The delightfully dreamy heroine of Agnes Desarthe's playful and piquant new novel is about to find out.

Myriam’s sudden, characteristically impulsive decision to open a restaurant transforms her life in a curious way. For six years, Myriam has been living in self-imposed exile, cut off from her cool, reserved husband and from the son she found herself unable to love, and the opening night of Chez Moi is typically desolate. But little by little, Myriam’s mouth-watering dishes draw people in, first the florist from across the road, followed by the schoolchildren tempted by a four-euro lunch, and then Ben, the most unflappable and devoted of waiters. As the restaurant sizzles towards success, figures and feelings from Myriam’s past also begin to emerge, gradually reawakening her appetite for life, both the bitter parts and the sweet.

Simmering with stories, recipes, observations and dreams, Chez Moi serves up a painfully adult story, with an irresistible sprinkling of wonder and magic.

Agnes Desarthe has written for children and teenagers as well as adult fiction. She has had two previous novels translated into English: Five Photos of My Wife, short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly Prize and Good Intentions.

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.

The Magic Kingdom

Stanley Elkin

Dalkey Archive ISBN 9781564782595 

Abandoned by his wife and devastated by the death of his twelve-year old son, Eddy Bale becomes obsessed with the plight of terminally ill children and develops a plan to provide a last hurrah dream vacation for seven children who will never grow-up.

Eddy and his four dysfunctional chaperones journey to the entertainment capital of America—Disney World. Once they arrive, a series of absurdities characteristic of an Elkin novel—including a freak snowstorm and a run-in with a vengeful Mickey Mouse—transform Eddy's idealistic wish into a fantastic nightmare.

Stanley Elkin—a two-time recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award—is widely regarded as one of America's most important contemporary writers. During his lifetime he wrote more than a dozen novels and short-story collections, including The Magic Kingdom, The Franchiser, and The Dick Gibson Show.

Over the past seven years, Dalkey Archive Press has restored almost all of Elkin's work to print, having most recently reissued The Living End in the spring of 2004.

The Illusion of Return

Samir El-Youssef

Halban Publishers ISBN 978 1 905559 01 5

Meeting a friend after many years’ separation, the narrator wonders whether the events they both lived through in Lebanon really took place. Time and distance give a sense of unreality but when the narrator and Ali meet at Heathrow Airport, after seventeen years, the past slowly begins to unfold.

Like so many other Palestinians who were born in the Lebanon, they had to leave in the mid-1980s, when it became a battlefield for different militias and armies – Lebanese, Palestinian, Israeli and Syrian. Ali leaves for America and, two years later, the narrator leaves for London.

Their memories are concentrated on one fatal night when they and two other friends are together for the last time, before tragedy strikes. But for the narrator, a personal tragedy had struck much earlier, one which he would never forget and could not share.

Samir El-Youssef, a Palestinian, was born in Rashidia, a refugee camp in Lebanon and has lived in London since 1990. His collection of stories, Gaza Blues, co-authored with the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, received wide acclaim and has been translated into several languages. The Illusion of Return is his first novel in English.

His essays and reviews have appeared in various publications including Guardian, Al-Hayat, New Statesman, Nizwa, Jewish Quarterly and The Washington Post, amongst others. Samir El-Youssef is also a peace campaigner and in 2005 won the Tucholsky Award for promoting the cause of peace and freedom of speech in the Middle East.

The Ministry of Special Cases

Nathan Englander

Faber ISBN 9780571235421

August 2007

Kaddish Poznan chips the names off gravestones for a living, removing traces of disreputable ancestors for their more respectable kin. His wife Lillian works in insurance, earning money when people live longer than they fear. Set in a tumultuous Buenos Aires on the cusp of a military coup, the couple's own tumultuous relationship is held together by their role as parents dedicated to a teenage son.

As Argentina's Dirty War unfolds around them, and innocents begin to disappear, the Poznan family's sometimes hilarious misadventures are soon replaced by something much darker. A visit to the dreaded Ministry of Special Cases is only the start of Englander's stunning vision of a nation in the hold of corruption and torture, a place where absurdity, despair and hope are the end products of a bureaucracy run out of control.

Nathan Englander's collection of stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, was met with extraordinary acclaim, became an international bestseller, and won several awards. The Ministry of Special Cases, his first novel, has been ten years in the making, and is as ambitious as it is mesmerizing.

Double or Nothing

Raymond Federman

Two Ravens Press ISBN 9781906120207

March 2008

Double or Nothing is a concrete novel – one in which the words become physical materials on the page. Federman gives each page a shape: makes it into a picture. The words move, cluster, jostle and collide in a tour de force full of puns, parodies and imitations. Within these startling and playful structures Federman develops two characters and two narratives. The first of these deals with the narrator and his effort to make the book; the second deals with the story that the narrator intends to tell: the story of a young man’s arrival in America from post-war Europe. The character of the young man clearly emerges from his obsessions; madly transfixing details – noodles, toothpaste, a first subway ride, a sock full of dollars – become milestones in the young man’s discovery of America. These details, combined with the desperation of the characters, create a book that is at the same time hilarious and frightening. Double or Nothing, a classic of innovative fiction, challenges not only the way that we read fiction, but the way that we see words. The original edition of Double or Nothing won the Frances Steloff Fiction Prize and the Panache Experimental Fiction Prize; the German translation won two literary prizes.

Raymond Federman was born in France, and went to the United States soon after World War II. At the age of 14, Federman was hastily thrust into the small upstairs closet of their Paris apartment by his mother just before she, his father and two sisters were taken to Auschwitz, where they were killed. Federman’s work focuses on the attempt to find a language appropriate for the enormity of the Holocaust and his part in its legacy; ultimately he espouses the concept of laughterature – laughter as a means of survival. Federman is considered internationally to be one of the most influential representatives of postmodern literature. As well as novels, his work encompasses books of poetry, essays, criticism and translations, it has been translated into a dozen languages, been adapted for stage and screen, and has received numerous awards – including the American Book Award (1986). Federman now lives in San Diego, California.

Love Falls

Esther Freud

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747586968

June 2007

A teenage girl encounters love and dark secrets in sun-baked Siena

It is July, three months after Lara’s seventeenth birthday, and she is about to exchange the exhaust fumes of the Holloway Road for the Tuscan hillsides, for a summer holiday with her distant, charismatic father.

At Via Campanelli they are greeted by the cool, elegant Caroline whose sardonic composure leaves Lara tongue-tied and awkward. But as Lara’s skin begins to turn golden, she begins to find herself relaxing, seduced by the limpid beauty of the place. When she is taken for dinner at the villa of the neighbouring Willoughbys, she finds herself suddenly under new scrutiny. Though thrown and embarrassed by the glamour and noisy ebullience of the family, Lara is drawn to Kip, a carelessly beautiful boy a couple of years older than her. But a summer spent under the spell of the Willoughbys will leave her changed forever.

The Dissident

Nell Freudenberg

Picador ISBN 9780330493437 
May 2007

A famous Chinese performance artist and political activist accepts an artist's residency in Los Angeles, where he is to stay with a wealthy Beverly Hills family. From the moment he arrives, however, it becomes clear that all is not what it seems -- on either side. The dissident seems strangely reluctant to talk about his past, and is happier teaching than working on projects of his own; his hosts appear -- on the surface at least -- to be a happy, nuclear family, yet their relationships are, in fact, fraught with rivalries and tensions.

Set in Los Angeles and Beijing, The Dissident tells the story of a life in flux and a family near breaking point -- and what happens when the two collide.

'Nell Freudenberger is awesomely skilled at making characters, setting scenes, and launching an old-fashioned plot suited to the 21st century. These tremendous novelistic powers would justify some showing off, but Freudenberger never flaunts her gifts. She merely puts them to use. Such mature, self-effacing accomplishment is remarkable anywhere -- but in a first novel? Try suspending that disbelief' Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision

All the Sad Young Literary Men

Keith Gessen

Heinemann ISBN 9780434017614

April 2008

A charming yet scathing portrait of young adulthood at the opening of the twenty-first century, All the Sad Young Literary Men charts the lives of Sam, Mark, and Keith, as they overthink their college years, underthink their love lives, and struggle through the encouragement of the women who love and despise them to find a semblance of maturity, responsibility, and even literary fame.

Heartbroken in his university town, Mark tries to focus his attention on his graduate work concerning Russian revolt, only to be lured again and again to the free pornography on the library computers. Sam binds himself to the task of crafting “the first great Zionist epic” even though he speaks no Hebrew, has never visited Israel, and is not a practicing Jew. Keith, thwarted by inherited notions of greatness and memories of his broken family, finds solace in the arms of the selfless woman who most reminds him of his past.

At every turn, at each character’s misstep, All the Sad Young Literary Men radiates with comedic warmth and biting honesty and signals the arrival of a brave and trenchant new writer.

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. She is the editor of Index on Censorship.

The Clothes on Their Backs

Linda Grant

Virago ISBN 9781844085408

February 2008

In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. Then one morning a glamorous uncle appears, dressed in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in a leopard-skin hat on his arm. Why is Uncle Sandor so violently unwelcome in her parents' home? This is a novel about survival - both banal and heroic - and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce desire to live. Set against the backdrop of a London from the 1950s to the present day, The Clothes on Their Backs is a wise and tender novel about the clothes we choose to wear, the personalities we dress ourselves in, and about how they define us all.

Linda Grant is a novelist and journalist. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000 and the Lettre Ulysses Prize for Literary Reportage in 2006. She writes for the Guardian, Telegraph and Vogue.

Satsuma Sun-mover

Adam Green

Lazy Gramophone Press: ISBN 0955253004

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.

Secret

Philippe Grimbert

Translated from the French by Polly McLean

Portobello Books ISBN 9781846270437

Based on the author's own family history and already a colossal best-seller in Europe, UK readers are now being let in on the story of a family haunted by the secrets of their past: an illicit love affair, a lost child, and a devastating betrayal dating back to the Second World War.

The day after I turned fifteen, I finally discovered what I'd always known...

Growing up in post-war Paris as the sickly only child of glamorous, athletic parents, the narrator invents for himself a make-believe brother, older, stronger, and more brilliant than he can ever be. It is only when the boy begins talking to an old family friend that he comes to realise that his imaginary sibling had a real predecessor: a half-brother whose death in the concentration camps is part of a buried family secret that he was intended never to uncover.

"Spare, remarkable novel, which reads as easily as a children's tale, yet packs a grown up punch." Lisa Appignanesi

See Under: Love

David Grossman

Vintage ISBN 978-0099289883

November 1999

The year is 1959, and nine-year-old protagonist and narrator Momik--the only child of survivors of the Holocaust--dutifully copies all the exhortations of his parents and neighbors into a notebook. Grappling with such ominous terms as "over there," "the nasty beast," and "children of the heart," Momik learns to hide all his feelings and shield himself from all attachments.

Yet something in Momik pushes him into strange, perilous confrontations with the world of pain and love he is determined to avoid. And through the stories that his great-uncle—famous as the children's writer Scheherazade—tells Momik about the "children of the heart" (as he told them to the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp during the war), Momik, too, becomes "infected with humanity," with the intense loving-kindness that exists alongside the horrors of our history.

An incredibly original and imaginative novel by one of Israel's truly gifted writers.

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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Little Face

Sophie Hannah

Hodder & Stoughton ISBN: 0340840323 

Alice`s baby is two weeks old when she leaves the house without her for the first time. On her eager return, she finds the front door open, her husband asleep on their bed upstairs. She rushes into their baby`s room and screams. `This isn`t our baby! Where`s our baby?` Her increasingly hostile husband swears she must be either mad or lying, and the DNA test is going to take a week.

One week later, before the test has been taken, Alice and the baby have disappeared. Run away, abducted, murdered? The police who dismissed her baby swap story must find out, and as they do they find dark incidents in David`s past - like the murder of his ex-wife...

Hurting Distance

Hodder & Stoughton ISBN: 9780340840344

August 2007

Three years ago, something terrible happened to Naomi Jenkins – so terrible that she never told anybody.

Now Naomi has another secret – the man she has fallen passionately in love with, unhappily married Robert Haworth. When Robert vanishes without trace, Naomi knows he must have come to harm. But the police are less convinced, particularly when Robert`s wife insists he is not missing.

In desperation, Naomi has a crazy idea. If she can`t persuade the police that Robert is in danger, perhaps she can convince them that he is a danger to others. Then they will have to look for him – urgently. Naomi knows how describe in detail the actions of a psychopath. All she needs to do is dig up her own troubled past . . .

The Welsh Girl

Peter Ho Davies

Sceptre ISBN 9780340938256

May 2007

In 1944, a German Jewish refugee is sent to Wales to interview Rudolf Hess; in Snowdonia, a seventeen-year-old girl, the daughter of a fiercely nationalistic shepherd, dreams of the bright lights of an English city; and in a nearby POW camp, a German soldier struggles to reconcile his surrender with his sense of honour. As their lives intersect, all three will come to question where they belong and where their loyalties lie.

Peter Ho Davies`s thought-provoking and profoundly moving first novel traces a perilous wartime romance as it explores the bonds of love and duty that hold us to family, country, and ultimately our fellow man. Vividly rooted in history and landscape, THE WELSH GIRL reminds us anew of the pervasive presence of the past, and the startling intimacy of the foreign.

The Archivist's Story

Travis Holland

Bloomsbury 9780747584193
July 2007

It is Moscow, in 1939. In the recesses of the infamous Lubyanka prison, a young archivist is sent to verify the authorship of an unfinished story, confiscated from one of the many political prisoners there. The writer is Isaac Babel. The great author of "Red Cavalry" is spending his last days forbidden to write, his final works consigned to the archivist, Pavel Dubrov - who will ultimately be charged with destroying them. Pavel, a former schoolmaster and a lover of literature, a reluctant minion in Stalin's system, makes a reckless decision: he will save the last stories of the writer he admires, whatever the cost. Pavel's daring in the face of a vast bureaucracy of evil invigorates a life that had slowly lost its meaning, even as it guarantees his almost certain undoing. A story of suspicion, courage and unexpected grace, "The Archivist's Story" is ultimately a tribute to the enduring power of the written word.

Travis Holland has an MFA from the University of Michigan, where he was twice awarded the Avery Jules Hopwood Award as well as the Meijer Award. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Glimmer Train and Five Points. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This is his first novel.

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

The Mark of the Angel

Nancy Huston

Vintage ISBN 978-0099283645

August 2000

This extraordinarily compelling novel centres on an intense, adulterou s love affair between Saffie, a silent young German woman who is first maid and then wife to a famous flautist, and Andras, the Jewish flute -mender to whose little atelier she takes her husband's flute to be me nded. Their liaison doesn't break the same taboos as The Reader but their love is 'forbidden' not only in the sense that it's adulterous, but also because she always takes her baby son along in his pram, as a cover and protection. Both the German woman and the Jew have been damaged by WWII; she more traumatically and personally than he - watching her mother's rape and branding by Russian soldiers, being raped herself, and then finding out after the war that her gentle scientist father was implicated in Nazi experiments with drug trials. Their stories unfolds in Paris at the height of the Algerian war in the 1950s, bringing the madness of war back into the present. The flute-mender, left-wing and committed, is involved on the fringes of the Algerian liberation movement in Paris. The ending is tragic and devastating, when the husband discovers the affair.

Fault Lines

Atlantic Books ISBN 978-1843547563

March 2008

Sol is a highly gifted six-year-old; his adoring mother believes he is destined for greatness. Yet he is also unsettling, chillingly un-childlike. He bears the same birthmark as his father, grandmother and great-grandmother had before him. When Sol and his family make an unexpected trip to Germany, terrible secrets start to emerge.Narrated by children in each generation of the family, "Fault Lines" traces their history back through the years, from California to New York, from Haifa to Toronto and Munich. As dormant family secrets are awakened, shock waves reverberate from a hidden past into a fragile present.Domestic in focus and epic in scope, "Fault Lines" is a vibrant, richly drawn and captivating piece of storytelling. It shows what can happen when past and present collide. Birthmarks are not all that can be passed down through a family line...

The Camel Trail

Judy Jackson

Marsons ISBN 978-0-9517220-2-2

March 2007

The Levy family kept notebooks and accounts going back to 1840. The story of their lives is dotted with extracts from these journals, giving brief descriptions of the food they ate. As in real life, both happy and tragic events are often bound up with memories of family meals. For the Levys food was more than just a necessity; it was an integral part of their existence, of their place in society.

The Camel Trail is a startling first novel, based on a true story.

It is 1944. Anna Grant inherits a strange legacy from her mother, Dina: a treasure retrieved from a disaster in the Middle East, and a pile of yellowing notebooks . The handwritten pages hint at a world of elegant Victorian tables and lavish balls. Yet behind the apparent calm in the family lies a story of deception and betrayal.

Anna searches for the truth about her grandfather David Levy. What was the catastrophe that left him orphaned in 1837? What brought his seemingly happy marriage to the brink of collapse? She retraces journeys, following a trail from Safed to Gibraltar, from London to Lisbon. While Anna uncovers layers of joy and sadness, revealing the reason for her mother’s repressive behaviour, she copes with her own eccentric husband and the problems of bringing up a child in wartime Britain. But it is the final journey that unlocks the mystery of inherited misery. In her search for the origin of the treasure, Anna uncovers a secret that tormented David all his life.

The novel is an exploration of the author's roots - beginning in Safed in the 1830s and moving through Gibraltar, London and Lisbon. A set of authentic notebooks hints at the lives of David Levy and his family, though the intrigue and mystery surrounding his life is revealed gradually, ending in the discovery of a secret that affected the lives of three generations.

The author is food writer and novelist Judy Jackson. She has written seven books on food, one of which sold over 40,000 copies. She has produced freelance pieces for many national newspapers, including The Times, The Independent, The Evening Standard and The Telegraph. She writes restaurant reviews for Time Out (Eating Out in London).

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.

Everything Passes

Gabriel Josipovici

Carcanet ISBN-10: 1 857548 50 7

Everything passes. The good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow.
Everything passes.

Or does it?

A man stands at a window, looking out. Behind him, a room, bare of people and of furniture. Fragments of conversations drop into his head, conversations with his first and second wife, with his children, with his friends. A life can slowly be pieced together, culminating in a terrifying near-death experience.

Gabriel Josipovici has created a compressed, poetic narrative of solitude, love, illness and the ambiguous comforts of art. As clear and elusive as the arts it explores, this is the most beautiful and mysterious of Josipovici's books to date.

Let it Be Morning

Sayed Kashua

Atlantic Books ISBN 1843545438

A young journalist, recently married with a young child, is seeking a quieter life away from the city and has bought a large new home in his parent's hometown. It's a complicated return - his wife hates his parents - but they are also moving back to live in an Arab village in Israel. Nothing is as they remember: everything is smaller, the people petty and provincial and the villagers divided between sympathy for the Palestinians and dependence on the Israelis. Suddenly and shockingly, the village becomes a pawn in the never-ending power struggles of the Middle East. When Israeli tanks surround the village without warning or explanation, everyone inside is cut off from the outside world. As the situation grows increasingly dire, paranoia begins to threaten the community's fragile equilibrium, forcing the hero to decide what it means to be human in an inhuman situation.

This is a gripping read with a chilling ending. A must read for anyone trying to understand Israeli politics from another perspective. Thought provoking and a must read. GDA

Closing the Sea

Yehudit Katzir

Toby Press ISBN 1-59264-157-1

March 2006

Dreams, memories, cinematic reality and a fertile imagination all feature in Yehudit Katzir’s four novellas that comprise this volume. In Schlaff stunde, the author describes her first love, who is her cousin. Fellini’s Shoes tells of a hotel waitress who dreams of becoming a movie star, who believes she can make her dream come true with the help of a failed director who once met Fellini. Disneyel is a daughter’s monologue to her unconscious mother who is lying in a hospital bed. Closing the Sea tells the story of a mousy teacher who goes to Tel Aviv to meet a successful childhood friend only to be disappointed by the friend’s apathy. When the sweet fantasy bursts, she is left with her memories.

Born in Haifa in 1963, Yehudit Katzir studied literature and cinema at Tel Aviv University. At present, she works as an editor for Hakibbutz Hameuchad/Siman Kriah Publishing House and teaches creative writing. Katzir, a bestselling author in Israel, has published two collections of stories and novellas, two novels and two children`s books. In addition to literary prizes for individual stories, Katzir has received the Book Publishers` Association`s Platinum and Gold Book Prizes, the Prime Minister`s Prize (1996), and the French WIZO Prize for Matisse Has the Sun in His Belly (2004).

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.

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?…

Fifty is not a Four-Letter Word

Linda Kelsey

Hodder & Stoughton ISBN : 9780340933398  

August 2007

Life begins at fifty…

Well, it certainly does for Hope, though not at all as she had planned. She reluctantly hits her half-century on New Year`s Day and six months later she has lost her job, her husband and her mother.

But Hope has guts – and a sense of humour. By the time she reaches fifty-one, she has acquired a taste for designer underwear, a Labrador puppy – and the memory of one perfect night in Paris. Who says fifty is over the hill?

Linda Kelsey is a former editor of Cosmopolitan and SHE, and was twice awarded Editor of the Year. She was also launch editor of Wedding Day and Executive Editor on the launch of In Style. She is now a freelance journalist and Contributing Editor to In Style and Easy Living magazines, writing on travel and books as well as general features. Her work appears regularly in a variety of magazines and newspapers ranging from Brides and Saga to the Daily Mail and Jewish Chronicle. In 2002 she wrote Was It Good For You, Too? 30 Years of Cosmpolitan (Robson Books). She lives in London with her husband and son.

The Nimrod Flip-Out

Etgar Keret

Vintage ISBN 0099497220

In this collection of bite-sized satiric tales, Israeli author Etgar Keret chronicles the strange ironies that suffuse his characters' lives. A man goes to bed each night with his beautiful girlfriend, only to find himself five minutes later lying next to a short fat guy who watches sport; a faithful dog refuses to disappear, even after being shot; a little girl covets the glittery eyes of her schoolfriend; a man is surprised by a middle-eastern pessimistic talking fish; a daemon makes a living from repossessing young writers' talents.

In stories as painfully funny as they are brief, Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain, confirming his status as both Israel's bestselling young writer and new national conscience.

Missing Kissinger

Chatto & Windus ISBN 0701179902

A magician tries to pull a rabbit out of a hat, but takes out only its head; a guy brings a girl home with him for the first time only to find that his best friend has pissed on his doorstep; a young man graduates from Magician School but soon discovers that he can't do everything; two drunk students do battle with a pavement and win; someone has a mother and a girlfriend who hate each other's guts, and they both demand that he gives them the other one's heart... many of the characters in these stories are waiting for something to change their lives, many of them can't quite reach ultimate happiness, some of them are sick, some are abandoned, and most have trouble communicating. The unexpected can, and usual does, happen.

Etgar Keret's stories are very short - and every word counts. They are quick, brief and precise, and they move us without hesitation. They are hilarious and off-the-wall, yet also dark, sometimes violent, and often intensely poignant. They are, in short, brilliant.

The One from the Other: A Bernie Gunther Mystery

Philip Kerr

Quercus ISBN 978-1847241351

July 2007

Bernie Gunther, the iconoclastic private-eye, is the ideal narrator for Philip Kerr’s bleak tale of the dirty deals made by victors and vanquished alike in post-war Germany.
Having learned that there’s no way to distinguish ‘the one from the other’, the cynical P.I. has the moral clarity to see through the deceit and hypocrisy of both friend and foe.
Munich, 1949: Amid the chaos of defeat, it’s a place of dirty deals, rampant greed, fleeing war criminals, and all the backstabbing intrigue that prospers in the aftermath of war. A place where a private eye can find a lot of not-quite-reputable work: cleaning up
the Nazi past of well-to-do locals, abetting fugitives in the flight abroad, sorting out rival
claims to stolen goods. It’s work that fills Bernie with disgust – but it also fills his sorely
depleted wallet. Then a woman seeks him out. Her husband has disappeared. She’s
not looking to get him back – he’s a wanted man who ran one of the most vicious
concentration camps in Poland. She just wants confirmation that he’s dead.

It’s a simple enough job. But in post-war Germany, nothing is simple…

Philip Kerr was born in Edinburgh and went on to study at the University of Birmingham.
He has written three other Bernie Gunther books and a book for children, entitled
Children of the Lamp. He lives in London and Cornwall. He is currently working on a new Bernie Gunther novel.

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.

The Rowing Lesson

Anne Landsman

Granta ISBN 978-1862079892

February 2008

In The Rowing Lesson, Anne Landsman has written a poignant and imaginative novel about the life and death of a beloved and complex man.

Betsy Klein rushes back to Cape Town from her home in New York to be at the bed-side of her dying father, Harry Klein.  She sits with him for his final hours and recounts to him his life story as she imagines it must have been.  Addressing him, she talks of his childhood, growing up in the Jewish community in South Africa, of his becoming a much admired doctor, his love affairs before meeting her mother and of his passion for the river Touw.  As the tale progresses, her life enters his lif, and she switches to the first person as she remembers her own memories, particularly the day when he took her out rowing.

The novel alternates between dream-like stories of the past, her father’s recent last visit to America and the present day realities of hospital death.  This is an outstanding, moving novel, distinguished by the beauty of the writing.

Anne Landsman is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Devil’s Chimney, which was nominated for four awards (the Pen/Hemingway Award, QPB’s New Voices, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and South Africa’s most prestigious literary award, the M-Net Book Prize).  She has been published in numerous publications including the American Poetry Review and the Washington Post.

Beaufort

Ron Leshem

Translated from Hebrew by Evan Fallenberg

Harvill Secker ISBN 9781846551307

February 2008

Beaufort, a remote and beautiful fort in southern Lebanon dating back to the Crusades, has been an outpost of the Israeli Defence Force for nearly twenty years, and now, for the teenage soldiers who live there presiding over the last moments of Israel's presence in Lebanon, it has become a world of its own, an enclave in the heart of enemy territory where boy soldiers create a state with its own rules and its own unique, outrageous, brutal language.

With a critical eye and an empathetic heart, Ron Leshem dishes up a wholly human story that takes place in conditions that are anything but. Fast-paced and brutally honest, unflinching and uproariously funny, Beaufort has been hailed – not only by critics but by the generation of soldiers who served in Lebanon during Israeli occupation – as the true voice of that sobering period.

Written as the diary of Liraz (Erez) Liberti, the head of a commando team stationed at Beaufort during the last winter of Israeli occupation, Beaufort is a revolutionary and potent look at the futility of war and death, and the courage it takes to put an end to it.This is not a story of war, but of retreat.This is a story with no enemy, only an amorphous entity that fires missiles from the surrounding mountains. And while thirteen young men propel the novel and give it life and colour, the real hero of Beaufort is fear: contagious, intoxicating, palpable fear, a word they forbid themselves from uttering. Beaufort is a devastating portrayal of a generation finding that the values and principles bestowed on them by their parents have betrayed them, and the terrifying nihilistic reality of Middle Eastern conflict.

A Tranquil Star

Primo Levi

Translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli

Penguin Classics ISBN 9780713999556

April 2007

Profound, moving and compassionate, Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing voices to emerge from the twentieth century. Here, for the first time in English, on the twentieth anniversary of his death, is a landmark selection of his fiction - all in brand new translations.

These exquisitely wrought stories open up a rich, vibrant world of wonder, adventure, resistance, love, cruelty and visceral energy, where nothing is as it seems. In 'The Fugitive' an office worker composes the most beautiful poem ever, only to find events taking on a strange life of their own; in 'Magic Paint' a group of researchers develop a paint that mysteriously protects them from misfortune, but dangerously miscalculate the outcome, and in 'Gladiators' and 'The Knall', Primo Levi chillingly explores modern-day mass violence.

Sometimes dark and haunting, sometimes wrily amusing, always rich with arresting images and curious twists of fate, these extraordinary tales are testament to one of the literary masters of our age.

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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Mrs Zhivago Of Queen's Park

Olivia Lichtenstein

Orion Books ISBN 0752876295

A sharp, funny and deliciously entertaining first novel about how to survive being forty, married, and just a little bit bored with your life.

Meet Chloe Zhivago, 43 and definitely not counting. Married for what feels like all eternity to Greg who tests his memory in infuriating ways, for example hiding the kettle from himself in the drum of the washing machine, Chloe is a successful psychotherapist with two children and a Famous Friend from hell. She's got it all. So why does she want to rub her life out and start again? Is this it? She asks herself. Will I never sleep with another man again? When Chloe meets temptation in the shape of Ivan, does she dare risk a passionate Russian romance before gravity wins the battle with her face and figure? Can she get away with one glorious, final fling? Dr Zhivago didn't. And just look what happened to Anna Karenina…

This is a razor sharp, wonderfully funny, sexy novel that asks a serious question - how do you keep love alive during a long marriage? - and answers it with poignancy and pure delicious comedy.

Holding My Breath

Sidura Ludwig

Tindal Street Press ISBN 9780955138478
March 2008

Growing up – with her mother Goldie, father Saul, her Baba and two maternal aunts – on McAdam Avenue in Winnipeg, young Beth Levy tells us: ‘I have become my family’s narrator.’ Shared stories, overheard conversations and the litany of things unsaid fuse together in Beth’s story, which evokes a whole community.

There’s Goldie – upholder of middle-class values and traditions; there’s her responsible, rather dowdy Aunt Carrie, a skilled seamstress with a secret past. And there’s her Aunt Sarah who takes Beth to the open-air pool: summer excursions hot with the promise of sexuality. But all the while, her dead Uncle Phil’s diaries entice Beth – into a fascination with the night sky. Despite her mother’s discouragement – ‘Space is not for little girls, Beth’ – and the difficulties of navigating between the old world and the new, Beth is determined to hold onto her dream of becoming an astronomer.