Fiction - B

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.

And remember, feedback is always welcome.

The Death of Eli Gold

David Baddiel

Fourth Estate ISBN 9780007270835

March 2011

In New York's Mt. Sinai hospital, the world's greatest living writer, Eli Gold, is dying. Witnessing his death are his precocious 8-year-old daughter by his present (fifth) wife, his anxiety-ridden 44-year-old son from his third marriage, and his 89-year-old first wife, watching on TV from a care home in London. And also, secretly, his fourth wife's fundamentalist Mormon brother, who has never got over his sister's death in a suicide pact with Eli, a suicide pact that he, Eli, survived.

The Death of Eli Gold is a comedy, a thriller, and a meditation on love, death, aging, sex, fame, and the idea - the dying idea - of The Great Man.

The Secret Purposes

Abacus ISBN 9780349117461

2005

David Baddiel's third novel, takes us into a little-known and still somewhat submerged area of British history: the internment of German Jewish refugees on the Isle of Man during the Second World War. Isaac Fabian, on the run with his young family from Nazism in East Prussia, comes to Britain assuming he has found asylum, but instead finds himself drowning in the morass of ignorance, half-truth, prejudice, and suspicion that makes up government attitudes to German Jews in 1940. One woman, June Murray, a translator from the Ministry of Information, stands out - and when she comes to the island on a personal mission to uncover solid evidence of Nazi atrocities, her meeting with Isaac will have far-reaching consequences for both of them. A haunting and beautifully written tale of love, displacement and survival, The Secret Purposes profoundly questions the way that truth - both personal and political - emerges from the tangle of history.

Whatever Love Means

Abacus ISBN 9780349113920

2000

Like most people, Vic Mullan - once described by his best friend Joe as 'a man whose sense of social responsibility is exhausted by pulling over to let an ambulance by' - can remember where he was and what he was doing on the day of Princess Diana's death. Yes, he can remember it particularly well: he was at home, beginning an affair with Emma, Joe's wife. The opening sections of David Baddiel's second novel chart the history of an intense and passionately sexual liaison set against the background of the most hysterical time in recent memory. But as the months wear on, and life and love return to normal, so things become more complex between Vic and Emma. And then, tragedy - a real, local, small-scale tragedy, as opposed to a national, iconic, mythological one - intervenes. Part-satire, part-love story, part-whodunnit, and part-meditation on the nature of sex and death, WHATEVER LOVE MEANS confirms Nick Hornby's assertion that David Baddiel has 'gone straight into the First Eleven of young contemporary British novelists'.

Time for Bed

Abacus ISBN 9780349113555

2000

Gabriel Jacoby can't get to sleep. In fact, he can't get anywhere at all, either in his Triumph Dolomite or his life. Everything around him, from his large collection of coffee-machines to his balding Bradford-born flatmate, is breaking down. Not that Gabriel is bothered; he's too busy being in love with his intensely happily married brother's wife. Which is why Gabriel chooses to waste all his time - because he knows that whatever else he might achieve, it won't be happiness. There's no way there, when you're in love with your brother's wife. Unless you remember your brother's wife has a sister...

Mr Sammler's Planet

Saul Bellow

Penguin Classics ISBN 9780141188812

Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a "registrar of madness," a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities). His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul. "Sorry for all and sore at heart," he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering. To Mr. Sammler-who by the end of this ferociously unsentimental novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beings-a good life is one in which a person does what is "required of him." To know and to meet the "terms of the contract" was as true a life as one could live.

A Dream Untold

Michael Berg

Rafael Q Publishers ISBN: 9781901017014
January 2009

One dream and two dreamers separated by 400 years. One place - the northern Israel town of Safed. The dream, full of Kabbalistic symbolism, propels Peter Paul Levi on a journey of enlightenment and immersion in the mystical world of 16th century Safed which is rife with tales of symbolic murder, reincarnation, spirit possession and exorcism.

Peter’s traumatic story is intertwined with the lives of Hayyim Vital, the original dreamer, and his teacher, Isaac Luria, who revolutionised Kabbalistic thought.  Together Vital and Luria embark on a mission to gather a group of followers whose souls are to become pure enough to enable the healing of the universe.

Peter enters their mystical world when he is filmed in the Ottoman house where the dream occurred. The story of how Peter regains his sanity from the resulting psychotic episode is compellingly revealed in this insightful book.

A Dream Untold is a novel of personal redemption and healing. This perceptive book captures the 16th century era of the mystics as a reflection of our modern-day angst.

In 1978 whilst on holiday in Safed, Michael Berg had a dream which affected him to his very core. Subsequent research revealed that the same dream had been dreamt in Safed 400 years earlier by the Kabbalist Hayyim Vital. This extraordinary event embarked Michael on a journey of self-realisation and an interest in the lives of the 16th century mystics of Safed culminating in A Dream Untold, his first novel. Now living in London and retired after a career in banking and consultancy, Michael is working on further novels.

The End of Everything

David Bergelson

Yale University Press ISBN 9780300110678

January 2010

Originally published in 1913, "The End of Everything" is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. Considered David Bergelson's masterpiece, it was written in Yiddish and until now has been unavailable in a complete and accurate English translation. This version by acclaimed translator Joseph Sherman finally brings the novel to a wide English-speaking audience. Bergelson depicts the lives of upwardly mobile, self-aware nouveaux riche Jews in the waning years of the Russian Empire. The central character, Mirel Hurvits, is an educated, beautiful woman who embodies the conflict between tradition and progress, aristocracy and enterprise. A forced marriage of convenience results in Mirel's emotional disintegration and provokes a confrontation with the expectations of her pious family and with Jewish tradition. In a unique prose style of unsurpassable range and beauty, Bergelson reduces language to its bare essentials, punctuated by silences that heighten the sense of alienation in the story.

The Free World

David Bezmozgis

Viking ISBN 9780670920051

April 2011

Welcome to Rome. It is the summer of 1978, and the Krasnansky family, bickering, tired and confused, are supposed to be passing through. Alongside thousands of other Soviet Jewish refugees - among them criminals, dissidents and refuseniks - they await passage to their new homes in the West. But escaping Communism is not so easy, especially when some of the Krasnanskys insist on bringing it with them, and even more so when their sponsor in the USA lets them down and they find that they're no longer passing through at all. On the contrary, they're stuck.

Welcome, then, to the waiting room of your life, and to a tragic yet comic tale of reckless brothers and long-suffering sisters, ailing parents and innocent children, of love affairs and criminal liaisons, of a wonderfully troubled family and a perpetually wandering people, and their epic search for a home: somewhere, anywhere - or Canada, as it turns out.

Natasha and Other Stories

Vintage ISBN 9780099461166

September 2005

Meet the Bermans - Bella, Roman and their son Mark - Russian Jews who have fled the Riga of Brezhnev for Toronto, the city of their dreams. Natasha brings the Bermans - and the Russian Jewish enclaves of Toronto - to life in stories full of big, desperate, utterly believable consequence. In 'Tapka', six-year-old Mark's first experiments in English bring ruin and near tragedy to the neighbours upstairs. In 'Roman Berman, Massage Therapist', Roman and Bella stake all their hopes for Roman's business on their first, humiliating dinner with a North American family. In the title story, a stark, funny anatomy of first love, we witness Mark's sexual awakening at the hands of his fourteen-year-old cousin, a new immigrant from the New Russia.

Random Harvest & Other Novellas

Haim Nachman Bialik

Toby Press ISBN 978159264094X

Haim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934) is celebrated as one of the leading figures in modern Jewish literature. Although most famous for his Hebrew poems, Bialik was also a master of short prose. Often expressing a realism and social awareness associated with the Russia of his youth, Bialik's stories showcase his gift for lyricism, symbolism and humor, captured in engaging vignettes of life in the Ukrainian countryside.

Random Harvest & Other Novellas takes into account the large and important corpus of Bialik criticism that has been published over the years. The novellas in this collection include Random Harvest, Behind the Fence, The Shamed Trumpet, Big Harry, The Short Friday, and The Legend of Three and Four.

Translated and with an introduction by David Patterson and Ezra Spichandler. David Patterson is President Emeritus of the Oxford Centre for Jewish & Hebrew Studies. Ezra Spicehandler is Professor Emeritus at Hebrew Union College.

Three Musketeers

Marcelo Birmajer

Translated from the Spanish by Sharon Wood

Toby Press ISBN 9781592641932

October 2008

Elias Traum, a former Argentinean currently residing in Israel, returns to Buenos Aires after twenty years of absence to mourn his two friends-

two fellow Jews who together with him once comprised "the three musketeers." These young men signed their own death sentences when they joined the Montoneros, the left-wing Peronist guerrilla group, back in the bad days of the Dirty Wars in the 1970s and 80s.

Javier Mosan is an unmotivated Jewish journalist who writes for a popular daily newspaper in Argentina. His main hobbies are indulging in sexual fantasies and dodging writing assignments. When Mosan is sent to interview Traum, he believes it will be yet another routine job. Yet upon arriving at the airport Mosan is attacked, while Traum is kidnapped, mugged and then deposited on the side of the road like so much garbage. There is no doubt that the past has returned to take revenge.

But what past is it? The revolutionary or the romantic? And how is the Israeli Intelligence involved? The story takes us from the bars of Buenos Aires to the beaches of Mar Del Plata, through a forgotten childhood and an era of dictatorship, between memories and reality, until everything converges in an exciting, thrilling ending.

Is It Good for the Jews? More Stories from the Old Country and the New

Adam Biro

Translated from the French by Catherine Tihanyi
University of Chicago Press ISBN 9780226052175
December 2009

“Jewish stories,” writes Adam Biro, “resemble every people’s stories.” Yet at the same time there is no better way to understand the soul, history, millennial suffering, or, crucially, the joys of the Jewish people than through such tales—“There’s nothing,” writes Biro, “more revelatory of the Jewish being.”

Through twenty-nine tales—some new, some old, but all finely wrought and rich in humor—Biro spins stories of characters coping with the vicissitudes and reverses of daily life, while simultaneously painting a poignant portrait of a world of unassimilated Jewish life that has largely been lost to the years. From rabbis competing to see who is the most humble, to the father who uses suicide threats to pressure his children into visiting, to three men berated by the Almighty himself for playing poker, Biro populates his stories with memorable characters and absurd—yet familiar—situations, all related with a dry wit and spry prose style redolent of the long tradition of Jewish storytelling.

A collection simultaneously of foibles and fables, adversity and affection, Is It Good for the Jews? reminds us that if in the beginning was the word, then we can surely be forgiven for expecting a punch line to follow one of these days.

Two Jews on a Train Stories from the Old Country and the New

University of Chicago Press ISBN 9780226052144  

"Two Jews were traveling on a train. . . . " Many Eastern European jokes—and several of the charming and often hilarious conversations in this book—begin this way. From all regions of the world and from all walks of life, the characters are young and full of life and old and ugly; they are rabbis, matchmakers, students, and immigrants. They gossip and speak about everything from the banalities of the world to the unspeakable evils of existence all for a single purpose: to laugh and to celebrate the good luck of being alive.

As Biro recounts these tales, we hear not only his voice and the voice of his father, but those of generations of storytellers who have used humor to teach about the truly important issues in life—the delicacy of love, the fragility of friendship, the pitfalls of self-righteousness, the costs of narrow-mindedness, and the unpredictability of life itself. Biro artfully spins each story, lingering on the details, guiding the reader to the inevitable—yet always unexpected—punchline.

Taken individually, these stories will make you laugh out loud; taken as a whole, they form an invaluable record of the sensibilities of an entire people. Biro writes: "These Jewish stories of which not a single one happened to me, and of which I did not invent a single one, do describe me, do characterize me, do explain me. They are always my own story. And yours."

Where the God of Love Hangs Out

Amy Bloom

Granta ISBN 9781847081681  

March 2010

Love, in its many forms and complexities, weaves through this collection. Bloom’s astonishing and astute new work of interconnected stories illuminates the mysteries of passion, family, and friendship.

Propelled by a dazzling prose, unmistakable voice, and generous wit, Where the God of Love Hangs Out takes us to the margins and the centers of real people’s lives, exploring the changes that love and loss create. A young woman is haunted by her roommate’s murder; a man and his daughter-in-law confess their sins in the unlikeliest of places. In one quartet of interlocking stories, two middle-aged friends, married to others, find themselves surprisingly drawn to each other, risking all while never underestimating the cost. In another linked set of stories, we follow mother and son for thirty years as their small and uncertain family becomes an irresistible tribe.

Insightful, sensuous, and heartbreaking, these stories of passion and disappointment, life and death, capture deep human truths. As The New Yorker has said, “Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books.”

Away

Granta ISBN 9781862079700

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.

The Third Day

Chochana Boukhobza

Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

Maclehose Press ISBN 9780857050960

March 2012

A leading Israeli musician and her protégé return to Jerusalem for three days to perform with the Philharmonic Orchestra. Both women - one a gifted young cellist, one a Holocaust survivor saved by her extraordinary musical talent - have been in America for some time, are quickly caught up in tangled threads from former lives. Elisheva is reunited with her godson, Daniel; Rachel must face both her distant father and Erytan, a former lover, whose lingering power over her now threatens all she has worked for. 

Elisheva is coaching Rachel for the solo performance, but something else has drawn her to Jerusalem. Another old friend has lured a Nazi eugenicist, the Butcher of Majdanek, to Israel from Venezuela. The Butcher performed torturous experiments on Elisheva, determining not only her fate but also that of her closest friends. On the third day of her stay, the day of the concert, she will take her revenge. 

Set in the late 1980s, The Third Day is a vivid portrait of life in Jerusalem and a sensitive meditation on the power of music and the sacrifices it demands. And at its heart is a gripping narrative of retribution that brings the novel's many moving strands towards a tense and shattering conclusion. 

Pantheon

Sam Bourne

HarperCollins ISBN 9780007413652 

March 2012

The darkest secrets of World War II… finally revealed.

Europe is ablaze. America is undecided about joining the fight against Nazism. And James Zennor, a brilliant, troubled, young Oxford don is horrified. He returns one morning from rowing to discover that his wife has disappeared with their young son, leaving only a note declaring her continuing love.

A frantic search through wartime England leads James across the Atlantic and to one of America’s greatest universities, its elite clubs and secret societies – right to the heart of the American establishment. And in his hunt for his family, James unearths one of the darkest and deadliest secrets of a world at war…

The Last Testament

Sam Bourne

HarperCollins ISBN 9780007203338

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.

The Final Reckoning

Sam Bourne

HarperCollins ISBN 9780007266494

July 2008

Tom Byrne has fallen from grace since his days as an idealistic young lawyer in New York. Now he'll work for anyone – as long as the money's right.

So when the United Nations call him in to do their dirty work, he accepts the job without hesitation. A suspected suicide bomber shot by UN security staff has turned out to be a harmless old man: Tom must placate the family and limit their claims for compensation.

In London, Tom meets the dead man’s alluring daughter, Rebecca, and learns that her father was not quite the innocent he seemed. He unravels details of a unique, hidden brotherhood, united in a mission that has spanned the world and caused hundreds of unexplained deaths.

Pursued by those ready to kill to uncover the truth, Tom has to unlock a secret that has lain buried for more than 60 years – the last great secret of the Second World War.

People of the Book

Geraldine Brooks

HarperPerennial ISBN 9780007177424

October 2008

When Hannah Heath gets a call in the middle of the night in her Sydney home about a precious medieval manuscript which has been recovered from the smouldering ruins of wartorn Sarajevo, she knows she is on the brink of the experience of a lifetime. A renowned book conservator, she must now make her way to Bosnia to start work on restoring The Sarajevo Haggadah, to discover its secrets and piece together the story of its miraculous survival. But the trip will also set in motion a series of events that threaten to rock Hannah’s orderly life, including her encounter with Ozren Karamen, the young librarian who risked his life to save the book.

As meticulously researched as all of Brooks’s previous work, People of the Book is a gripping and moving novel about war, art, love and survival.

Geraldine Brooks was born and raised in Australia. After moving to the USA she worked for eleven years on the Wall Street Journal, covering stories from some of the world’s most troubled areas, including Bosnia, Somalia and the Middle East.Her first novel, A Year of Wonders, was set during the English plague year of 1666, and became an international bestseller. In December 2005 March, her second novel, was selected by the Washington Post as one of the five best fiction works published during the year. In April 2006, the book earned Brooks the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.She lives with her husband and son in rural Virginia and is currently a fellow at Harvard University.