Fiction - A

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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And remember, feedback is always welcome.

Refusal

Soazig Aaron

Translated by Barbara Bray

Vintage ISBN 9780099466659 

July 2008

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

Touching Distance

Rebecca Abrams

PanMacmillan ISBN 9780330449526
July 2008

It is 1790. After ten years’ training in the great medical schools of Europe, Alec Gordon has returned to Scotland to take up the post of Physician to the Aberdeen Dispensary. Alec has ambitious plans for modernizing medical practice in the town, starting with the local midwives, whose ignorance and old-fashioned methods appal him.

But Alec’s dreams of progress are thrown into disarray when a mysterious disease suddenly strikes the town, attacking and killing every newly delivered mother for miles around. Alec alone recognizes it as childbed fever, a disease more deadly than the plague, a condition that has baffled the greatest physicians of the age, an illness with no known cause and no known cure.

Desperate to save his patients’ lives, Alec sets out on an astonishing medical quest to conquer the disease. But while Alec struggles to find solutions that lie far in the future, his wife Elizabeth is increasingly lost in the past, prey to terrifying memories of her childhood in Antigua. As she knows and he will learn, some diseases lie beyond the reach of reason.

Based on a true story, Touching Distance is a stunning historical novel that brings to life a fascinating period in world history, exploring the tragic limitations of knowledge and the deep-seated tension between reason and passion in the Age of Enlightenment.

Rebecca Abrams is the author of both fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction titles include When Parents Die, an established classic in its field, and Three Shoes One Sock and No Hairbrush, the best-seller guide to having a second child. An award-winning journalist, she is a former columnist on the Daily Telegraph and a long-standing reviewer for the Guardian.

Eight White Nights

Andre Aciman

Atlantic Books ISBN 978 1 84887 620 0

January 2011

An unforgettable journey through the experience of time and desire, where passion and fear and the sheer craving to ask for love and to show love can forever alter who we are. 

A man in his late twenties goes to a large Christmas party in Manhattan where a woman introduces herself with three words: 'I am Clara.' Over the following seven days, they meet every evening in the snowy city. Overwhelmed yet cautious, he treads softly and won’t hazard a move. The tension between them builds, marked by ambivalence, hope, and distrust. Moving both closer together, then further apart, this amorous dance builds towards a New Year's Eve charged with magic, the promise of renewal and love.

A Simple Story

S.Y. Agnon

Syracuse University Press ISBN 9780815606185

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.

The Lessons

Naomi Alderman

Viking ISBN 9780670916290

April 2010

Hidden away in an Oxford back street is a crumbling Georgian mansion, unknown to any but the few who possess a key to its unassuming front gate. Its owner is the mercurial, charismatic Mark Winters, whose rackety trust-fund upbringing has left him as troubled and unpredictable as he is wildly promiscuous.

Mark gathers around him an impressionable group of students: glamorous Emmanuella, who always has a new boyfriend in tow; Franny and Simon, best friends and occasional lovers; musician Jess, whose calm exterior hides passionate depths. And James, already damaged by Oxford and looking for a group to belong to.

For a time they live in a charmed world of learning and parties and love affairs. But university is no grounding for adult life, and when, years later, tragedy strikes they are entirely unprepared.

Universal in its themes of ambition, desire and betrayal, this spellbinding novel reflects the truth that the lessons life teaches often come too late.

Disobedience

Penguin ISBN 9780141025957 

April 2007

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 and Winner of Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2007

Mere Anarchy

Woody Allen

Ebury Press ISBN 0091920329
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.

Yasmine   

Eli Amir

Translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin

Halban Publishers ISBN 9781905559237

February 2011

“I’m an Arab Jew. I listen to classical music in the morning and Arabic music in the evening.” Surprisingly for someone so young, Nuri Imari (whose family we encountered in The Dove Flyer), is appointed advisor on Arab affairs to the Israeli government. With little guidance he is asked by his boss to “set up an office in East Jerusalem, sniff around to see what’s happening there, meet their effendis, and provide me with your evaluations.” 

Everyone is reeling from the aftermath of the Six Day War. The Palestinians cannot comprehend their losses, whilst the Israelis are waking up to a new political reality – and new responsibilities. 

Nuri discovers complexities and loyalties he could never have imagined. He tries to steer a humane course but soon finds himself confronting bigotry and hatred on both sides. 
And then he meets Yasmine, a Palestinian woman recently returned from Paris…  

The Dove Flyer

Halban Publishers ISBN 9781905559183

February 2010

When his Uncle Hizkel is arrested, Kabi and his family face an uncertain future as do all Jews living in Baghdad. It is 1950 and each member of Kabi’s circle has a different dream: his mother wants to return to the Moslem quarter where she felt safer; his father wants to emigrate to Israel and grow rice there; Salim, his headmaster, wants Arabs and Jews to be equal, and Abu Edouard just wants to care for his beloved doves.

Eli Amir was born in Baghdad in 1937 and left for Israel in 1950. A prize-winning author, he is also a social activist, once saying in Cairo ‘How can there be peace without us knowing each other?’

Blooms of Darkness

Aharon Appelfeld

Translated by Jeffrey M. Green

Alma Books ISBN 9781846881480

September 2011

The ghetto in which the Jews have been confined is being liquidated by the Nazis, and eleven- year-old Hugo is brought by his mother to the local brothel, where one of the prostitutes has agreed to hide him. Mariana is a bitterly unhappy woman who hates what she has done to her life, and night after night Hugo sits in her closet and listens uncomprehendingly as she rages at the Nazi soldiers who come and go. When she’s not mired in self-loathing, Mariana is fiercely protective of the bewildered, painfully polite young boy. And Hugo becomes protective of Mariana too, trying to make her laugh when she is depressed, soothing her physical and mental agony with cold compresses.

As the memories of his family and friends grow dim, Hugo falls in love with Mariana. And as her life spirals downwards, Mariana reaches out for consolation to the adoring boy who is on the cusp of manhood. Multi-awardwinning writer Aharon Appelfeld once again crafts out of the depths of unfathomable tragedy a renewal of life and a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

A Table for One: Under the Light of Jerusalem

Translated by Aloma Halter

Toby Press ISBN 9781592641970

A Table for One is a memoir of Aharon Appelfeld’s city, Jerusalem. It brings forth an unknown side of Appelfeld’s writing as he reveals the centrality of Jerusalem in his life and work. We discover that his “city of light” proved to be far more than a shelter and the place where Appelfeld came of age and spent his adult life: it became his inspiration—the quarry of his imagination. A Table for One is set in the intimate Jerusalem cafés of the 1950s and 1960s, where the scent of fresh roasted coffee and cigarette smoke wafted in with the elan of a lost European culture. Appelfeld found that it was only in a cafe—only in a Jerusalem cafe—that he could write his novels, shaping meaning and wholeness out of the fragments of his painful past.

AHARON APPELFELD is considered one of Israel's finest writers. A Holocaust survivor and post-war refugee, he made his way to Italy and immigrated to Israel in 1946. Born in 1932 in Czernovitz, Bukovina (now part of the Ukraine), Appelfeld's work is recognized worldwide as among the most profound literary explorations of the Holocaust, and has met with international critical and popular acclaim. Appelfeld has received the Israel Prize, the American National Jewish Book Award, the French Prix Medicis and the German Nelly Sachs Prize.

Badenheim, 1939

Translated by Dalya Bilu

Quartet Books ISBN 9780704380264

A tale of Europe in the days just before the war. It tells of a small group of Jewish holiday makers in the resort of Badenheim in the Spring of 1939. Hitler's war looms, but Badenheim and its summer residents go about life as normal.

The Enemy of the Good

Michael Arditti

Arcadia Books ISBN 9781906413040

April 2009

This outstanding novel bravely tackles the bitter conflict between liberalism and fundamentalism. It does so through a cast of unforgettable characters depicted with wit, wisdom and shattering emotional power.

The Glanvilles are an extraordinary family. Edwin is a retired bishop who has lost his faith. Marta, a child of the Warsaw Ghetto, is a controversial anthropologist. Their son, Clement, is a celebrated gay painter traumatized by the death of his twin. Their daughter, Susannah, is a music publicist recovering from an affair with a convicted murderer. Over three remarkable years, the family goes through a sequence of events that causes it to reassess its deepest values and closest relationships. Clement’s work and reputation are violently attacked and his private life exposed. Susannah’s exploration of the Kabbalah takes her into the closed world of Chassidic Jews and a seemingly impossible love. Edwin’s illness forces Marta to confront the horrors of her past. Each must find a way to escape the abyss.

Michael Arditti was born in Cheshire and educated at Jesus College, Cambridge. He began his literary career writing plays, of which several were produced on the stage and the radio. He has written theatre criticism for The Times, The Sunday Times, Daily Mail and Sunday Express, and was, for many years, a regular reviewer for the Evening Standard. He currently reviews books for several papers and is a regular broadcaster on the BBC. His novel Easter, published in 2000, won the first Waterstone's Mardi Gras Award and was shortlisted for the Creative Freedom Award. Unity (2005) was shortlisted for the 2006 Wingate / Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize.

A Sea Change

Maia Press ISBN 9781904559214 

September 2006

'This is the story of how I became a man ...' In May 1939, the SS St. Louis left Hamburg for Havana, carrying almost a thousand refugees from Hitler's Germany. Over the following weeks, the ship criss-crossed the ocean, buffeted alternately by hope and disappointment, as it sought asylum in a friendly port and war drew inexorably closer. Based on actual events, Michael Arditti's enthralling new novel is the memoir of one of the passengers, fifteen-year-old Karl, heir to a department store fortune. He recounts both the horror and excitement of the trip, along with his personal voyage of discovery, as he learns the truth about his family, battles Nazi crew members and plans mutiny. Most momentously, he describes his first, passionate love affair with the beautiful young Johanna. A Sea Change is a mesmerising journey through history. A tale of dreams and betrayal, of courage and resilience, of romance and reconciliation, it unforgettably evokes an extraordinary summer in which a boy crosses the threshold from youth to maturity.

Unity

Maia Press ISBN 9781904559122 

May 2005

Michael Arditti explores the personalities and politics involved in the making of a lost 1970s film by a German director about the relationship between Unity Mitford and Hitler. The completion of the film was destroyed by a terrorist outrage, triggered by the growing sympathy of its leading actress for the cause of the Red Army Faction and her admiration of a charismatic Palestinian activist. Arditti himself features in the narrative as, almost thirty years later, he attempts to uncover the truth about two friends who took part in the film. He consults the scriptwriter's letters and the diaries of a Hollywood child star turned crusading socialist. He interviews two of the German actors and the film's producer, an Auschwitz survivor who has become a high-powered pornographer. He reads a revealing family memoir and corresponds with a Hollywood mogul. These testimonies - ranging from 1930s Britain to post-war Germany - are often conflicting and prove to be deeply disturbing. Startlingly original in concept and treatment, Unity is a profound exploration of the nature and consequences of evil.

Shortlisted for the 2006 Wingate / Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize.

Michael Arditti was born in Cheshire and educated at Jesus College, Cambridge. He began his literary career writing plays, of which several were produced on the stage and the radio. He has written theatre criticism for The Times, The Sunday Times, Daily Mail and Sunday Express, and was, for many years, a regular reviewer for the Evening Standard. He currently reviews books for several papers and is a regular broadcaster on the BBC. His novel Easter, published in 2000, won the first Waterstone's Mardi Gras Award and was shortlisted for the Creative Freedom Award.

Book of Clouds

Chloe Aridjis

Chatto & Windus ISBN 9780701184254

July 2009

Adrift in Berlin and with no desire to return home to Mexico, Tatiana cultivates solitude while trying to distance herself from the city’s past. Yet the phantoms of Berlin – seeping in through the floorboards of her apartment, lingering in the abandoned subterranea – are more alive to her than the people she passes on her daily walks.

When she takes a job transcribing notes for the reclusive historian Doktor Weiss, her life in Berlin becomes more complex. Through Weiss, she meets Jonas, a meteorologist who, as a child in the GDR, took solace in the sky's constant shape-shifting, an antidote to his unyielding and grim reality. As their three paths intersect and merge, the contours of all their worlds begin to change.

Unfolding with the strange, charged logic of a dream, Book of Clouds is a haunting, beautifully drawn portrait of a city forever in flux, and of the myths we cling to in order to give shape to our lives. From a crowded U-Bahn where Hitler appears dressed as an old woman, to an underground Gestapo bowling alley whose walls bear score marks of games long settled, Chloe Aridjis guides us through Berlin with wit and compassion, showing why cities, like people, cannot outrun their pasts.

Five Amber Beads
Richard Aronowitz-Mercer

Flambard Press ISBN 9781873226834 

November 2007

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.

Hope: A Tragedy

Shalom Auslander

Picador ISBN 9781447207658 

February 2012

Blackly hilarious, dangerously subversive, extraordinarily bold – this is liable to be the most controversial novel of the year

Solomon Kugel wishes for nothing more than to be nowhere, to be in a place with no past, no history, no wars, no genocides. The rural town of Stockton, New York, is famous for nothing: No one was born there, no one died there, nothing of any import has ever happened there, which is exactly why Kugel decided to move his family there. To begin again. To start anew.

But it isn’t quite working out that way. His ailing mother stubbornly holds on to life, and won’t stop reminiscing about the Nazi concentration camps she never actually suffered through. To complicate matters further, some lunatic is burning down farmhouses just like the one he bought, and he fears his is next. And when, one night, Kugel discovers history – a living, breathing, thought-to-be-dead specimen of history – hiding in his attic, bad very quickly becomes worse.

Like nothing you’ve read before, the critically acclaimed Shalom Auslander’s debut novel is a hilarious and disquieting examination of the burdens and abuse of history, propelled with unstoppable rhythm and filled with existential musings and mordant wit.

‘Scabrous and determinedly iconoclastic . . . one of the funniest and most thought-provoking novels you’ll read all year' Sunday Times

Beware of God
Shalom Auslander

Picador ISBN 9780330442039 

January 2006

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.