Fiction - E

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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Sum: Forty Stories from the Afterlife

David Eagleman

Canongate ISBN 9781847674272

April 2009

In the afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and unaware of your existence. Or you may find the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember. In some afterlives you are split into all your different ages, in some you are recreated based on your credit card records, and in others you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been. In these wonderfully imagined tales – at once funny, wistful and unsettling – Eagleman kicks over the chessboard of traditional notions and offers us a dazzling lens through which to see ourselves here and now. His stories are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of hope, love and death that cuts through human nature at innovative angles.

David Eagleman, PHD, is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston Texas where his research laboratory is developing a reputation for doing some of the most unusual experiments in contemporary neuroscience. He has had essays published in all manner of journals including Nature and Science. He also lectures widely and continues to be invited to speak at universities all around the world.

Interpreters

Sue Eckstein

Myriad Editions ISBN 9780956559968

September 2011

When Julia Rosenthal returns to the suburban estate of her childhood, the unspoken tensions that permeated her seemingly conventional family life come flooding back. Trying to make sense of the secrets and half truths, she is forced to question how she has raised her own daughter - with an openness and honesty that Susanna has just rejected in a very public betrayal of trust. Meanwhile her brother, Max, is happy to forge an alternative path through life, leaving the past undisturbed. But in a different place and time, another woman struggles to tell the story of her early years in wartime Germany, gradually revealing the secrets she has carried through the century, until past and present collide with unexpected and haunting results. In her devastating and beautifully understated second novel, Sue Eckstein takes the reader on a skilfully plotted journey where our growing awareness of Julia and Max's true heritage is in stark contrast to Julia's own interpretation of the past. Interweaving universal themes - the nature of identity, the meaning of family, the emotional legacy of the past - Interpreters magnificently unravels the impact of a war that resonates across four generations.

The Prague Cemetery

Umberto Eco

Harvill Secker ISBN 9781846554919

November 2011

Nineteenth-century Europe - from Turin to Prague to Paris - abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate black masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay one lone man? And what if that evil genius created the most infamous document of all? Eco takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the underbelly of world-shattering events. "The Prague Cemetery" is Umberto Eco at his most exciting, a novel immediately hailed as his masterpiece.

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.

If You Awaken Love

Emuna Elon

Translated from the Hebrew by David Hazony

Toby Press ISBN 9781592641451

2007 National Jewish Book Award Finalist

After Yair Berman left her and shattered all her dreams, the devastated Shlomtzion Drore escaped as far as possible from him and her intensely religious life in Jerusalem, becoming an interior designer in secular Tel-Aviv.

Twenty-one years later, her daughter has become engaged to his son, and Shlomtzion is forced to visit the controversial settlement in which Yair lives, not only to plan the wedding but to confront her former love and the mistakes of her life.

Set in Israel between the Six Day War and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, If You Awaken Love is the intensely moving story of a stormy and spiritual young girl and her love-hate relationships with her childhood sweetheart, with her father, and with God.

Emuna Elon was born in Jerusalem in 1955. She is currently teaching and writing. She has published one novel, seven children’s books and many short stories. She has lived in the settlement of Beit-El since 1982, and has six children.

A Treaty of Love

Samir El-Youssef

Halban Publishers ISBN 9781905559091 

October 2008

In London a couple meet at a party. She is Israeli and he Palestinian. Both are here to escape the politics of their countries and both want to be alone. Despite that, their relationship develops and inevitably they have to confront the politics that, in principle, separates them. Can their relationship survive? A clever, well-paced novel.

The Illusion of Return

Halban Publishers ISBN 9781905559015

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 9780571235445

July 2008

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.

Visitation

Jenny Erpenbeck

Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky

Portobello Books ISBN 9781846271892

October 2010

By the side of a lake in Brandenburg, a young architect builds the house of his dreams - a summerhouse with wrought-iron balconies, stained-glass windows the color of jewels, and a bedroom with a hidden closet, all set within a beautiful garden. But the land on which he builds has a dark history of violence that began with the drowning of a young woman in the grip of madness and that grows darker still over the course of the century: the Jewish neighbors disappear one by one; the Red Army requisitions the house, burning the furniture and trampling the garden; a young East German attempts to swim his way to freedom in the West; a couple return from brutal exile in Siberia and leave the house to their granddaughter, who is forced to relinquish her claim upon it and sell to new owners intent upon demolition. Reaching far into the past, and recovering what was lost and what was buried, Jenny Erpenbeck tells an exquisitely crafted, stealthily chilling story of a house and its inhabitants, and a country and its ghosts.