Fiction - F
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.
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.
The Russian Jerusalem
Elaine Feinstein
Carcanet Press ISBN
9781857549102
 Beginning in present-day St Petersburg, The Russian Jerusalem explores the landscape of twentieth century Russian literature. In this evocative autobiographical novel, distinguished poet, translator, novelist and biographer Elaine Feinstein moves among the dead poets of Stalin's Russia with the poet Marina Tsvetaeva as her Virgil, mingling with the ghosts of writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. These imaginary encounters are interspersed with new poems by Feinstein. The author, herself of Russian descent, reconstructs the lives and fates of Russian, often Jewish, writers during the long age of Soviet terror, re-establishing them at the heart of the European tradition.
In this fascinating, lyrical meditation on literature, politics, suffering and friendship, Elaine Feinstein - a biographer of poets and a poet of the first rank herself - takes us on a richly imagined journey through a lost literary archipelago, and reconstructs the lives and fates of Russian, often Jewish, writers during the long age of Soviet terror. Combining family history, travels through modern Russia and very personal encounters with famous ghosts, Feinstein evokes, throughpoetry and prose, both the inferno of cruelty and persecutions, and a golden Jerusalem of creativity, talent and intense literary bonds. This is a moving, original work, for which Feinstein has created a selection of poems worthy of the predecessors she admires.' - EVA HOFFMAN.
A Scrap of Time
Ida Fink
Translated from the Polish
Northwestern University Press ISBN
9780810112599
December 1995
 A Scrap of Time is a haunting collection of stories about life in Poland during World War II. These shattering stories describe the lives of ordinary people as they are compelled to do the unimaginable: a couple who must decide what to do with their five-year-old daughter as the Gestapo come to march them out of town; a wife whose safety depends on her acquiescence in her husband's love affair; a girl who must pay a grim price for an Aryan identity card.
Born in 1921 in Zbaraz (currently in the Ukraine), Ida Fink spent the years 1941-1942 in the ghetto and survived after escaping to the "Aryan side". She has lived in Israel since 1957 where she writes, in Polish, exclusively about the Holocaust.
To be more precise, Ida Fink writes about how individual people survived - what resistance strategies they chose, what remained in their memories, how they tell the story. As the titles indicate, the stories are mere scraps and vestiges of the past. Only in this way, fragmentary and hardly epic, dry, sometimes tinged with a trace of irony or humor, is it possible to speak about the Holocaust. The short story form is imposed here not by aesthetics, but by the cruelty of the world.
A Film by Spencer Ludwig
David Flusfeder
Fourth Estate ISBN
9780007250318
February 2010
 A hilarious and heartbreaking father-son road movie of a novel.
Spencer Ludwig, idealist and filmmaker, is making one of his regular duty visits from London to New York City to tend to his declining but still fearsome father. Driving back from one of their doctors' appointments, Spencer decides not to take the turn to his father’s apartment: instead, they hit the road. Ahead of them will be an emotional ride taking in police and prostitutes, film festivals and gambling in Atlantic City, as father and son try to make sense of each other’s lives and hearts, and their own. To reach, Spencer hopes, a suitably cinematic conclusion.
The Pagan House
Harper Perennial ISBN
9780007249619
August 2008
Edgar was neither hard-bitten nor hard-boiled. He hadn’t seen too much – he’d hardly seen anything at all – and he was bursting, overflowing, with inaccessible juvenile potency. No one would suspect him of a dangerous agenda. But he could not drive a car. And he still needed permission to stay out past suppertime. Edgar Pagan, nearly thirteen, detests his English mother’s new boyfriend, so when she takes her son away from him across the Atlantic to spend time with his American father, it is a relief and a new adventure for him. He is an unlikely detective, Edgar, but that is what he becomes at the Pagan house, home to his grandmother Fay, and again some years later when he sets down on paper the Pagan past, in particular the peculiar circumstances of his father’s ancestors in the nineteenth century, ‘the story of how I came to be me.’ ‘The Pagan House’, David Flusfeder’s extraordinary new novel, is the story of how a family came to be established, of the extreme nineteenth-century Christian sect, the Perfectionists, utopians with a belief in free love, who built that family home. It is about the life and tragic death of Mary Pagan, the shaping force in this unusual family, and the impending death 150 years later of her descendent, Edgar’s grandmother, and the consequent destiny of that house. With its blend of detective novel, historical fiction and the painful coming-of-age of a confused young boy in Edgar, Flusfeder brilliantly weaves these strands together with style and verve.
The Gift
Harper Perennial ISBN
9780007140787
February 2004
 Problem: Best friends keep giving extremely generous gifts Solution: Give better ones in return
Philip has a lot on his mind. At home, in his unnecessarily large, excessively expensive house in south London, he is attempting to become a Taoist master of love with his wife Alice, but his quest is forever being interrupted by the requests of his twin daughters: Can we have a pony – please? I want to go to boarding school – please? At work, in his shed/office at the bottom of the garden, between countless games of Minesweep and FreeCell, Philip is trying to pay the mortgage by writing instruction manuals for Korean bread-making machines. And, at parties where he is concerned that he is not taken seriously (he has been variously mistaken as a doctor/waiter and sinologist) Philip tells the world he is a scriptwriter, even though all he has managed to pen is a story he calls Wang the Unlucky Scholar. But, above all, Philip is worrying about his best friends Sean and Barry. The problem is simple: they give great presents. Their gifts are exquisite: a full set of Italian crockery, a handmade corkscrew from Venice. They give them indiscriminately: on birthdays, at parties and quite often for no reason whatsoever. And, most distressingly, these presents break all bounds of generosity: two FA Cup Final tickets beside the royal box, a skiing holiday for Philip's entire family. These are gifts that hurt a man's pride, these are gifts that can never be matched.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Jonathan Safran Foer
Penguin ISBN
9780141012698
 Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur
entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies. When his father is killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre, Oskar sets out to solve the mystery of a key he discovers in his father's closet. It is a search which leads him into the lives of strangers, through the five boroughs of New York, into history, to the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, and on an inward journey which brings him ever closer to some kind of peace.
Everything is Illuminated
Penguin ISBN
9780141008257
 A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into bizarre new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis Jr, Jr. What they are looking for seems elusive - a truth hidden behind veils of time, language and the horrors of war. What they find turns all their worlds upside down.
The Blind Side of the Heart
Julia Franck
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell
Harvill Secker ISBN
9781846552137
June 2009
 Amid the chaos of civilians fleeing West in a provincial German railway station in 1945 Helene has brought her seven-year-old son. Having survived with him through the horrors and deprivations of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns. Many years earlier, Helene and her sister Martha's childhood in rural Germany is abruptly ended by the outbreak of the First World War. Her father, sent to the eastern front, comes home only to die. Their Jewish mother withdraws from the hostility of her surroundings into a state of mental confusion. Helene calls the condition blindness of the heart, and fears the growing coldness of her mother, who hardly seems to notice her daughters any more. In the early 1920s, after their father's death, she and Martha move to Berlin. Helene falls in love with Carl, but when he dies just before their engagement, life becomes meaningless for her and she takes refuge in her work as a nurse. At a party she meets Wilhelm, an ambitious civil engineer who wants to build motorways for the Reich and to make Helene his wife. Their marriage, which soon proves disastrous, takes Helene to Stettin, where her son is born. She finds the love and closeness demanded by the little boy more than she can provide, and soon she cannot shake off the idea of simply disappearing. Finally, she comes to a shocking decision.
The Blind Side of the Heart tells of two World Wars, of hope, loneliness and love, and of a life lived in terrible times. It is a great family novel, a powerful portrayal of an era, and the story of a fascinating woman.
Julia Franck was born in Berlin in 1970. She studied the anthropology of Native Americans, philosophy, and German language and literature at the Free University of Berlin. The Blind Side of the Heart won the German Book Prize, Germany's most prestigious literary award. She lives in Berlin.
Tales from the Secret Annexe 
Anne Frank
Halban Books ISBN 9781905559206
November 2010
 Anne Frank is known worldwide for her powerful Diary written whilst hiding from the Nazis. Less well known are these stories, fables, personal reminiscences and an unfinished novel – now re-issued after being out of print for many years.
Also included – for the first time in the UK – are Anne’s edited versions of some of her Diary entries which she re-worked after hearing an appeal by Gerrit Bolkestein, Minister for Art, Education and Science in the Dutch government in exile in London, to the Dutch people to send in, after the war, written accounts of their suffering under Nazi occupation. This gave Anne a purpose and straight away she began the task of re-writing and editing her diaries and stories.
Her humour, unflinching honesty and her wisdom – all evident in The Diary – are equally present in these Tales, rendering them an essential part of her legacy. To many people Anne Frank’s name has become synonymous with the Holocaust.
Love Falls
Esther Freud
Bloomsbury ISBN
9780747593195
June 2008
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
9780330493444
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
|
