Fiction - G

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.

CrocAttack

Assaf Gavron

Fourth Estate ISBN 9780007327461

March 2010

A darkly comic novel about the bizarre realities of life in Israel today.

Why is everyone so paranoid in this country? Can't dark guys get on buses with suit bags any more?Eitan Enoch - 'Croc' to his friends - is taking his usual bus to work in Tel Aviv one morning when a fellow passenger starts to worry about the dark-skinned man with the suit-bag sitting up at the front.Thus begins a week of bloody bombings and bloodier reprisals, at the end of which Croc is transformed into an inadvertent national celebrity: 'CrocAttack - the man the terrorists couldn't kill!' Naturally, the Palestinian cell behind the attacks are less than happy about this reluctant symbol of Israeli defiance. They may not have been after him before, but they are now. Meanwhile, in a hospital somewhere in Jerusalem, a young Palestinian suicide bomber lies in a coma, fighting for his life and trying to piece together how he got there - and just exactly what happened when he finally met the Croc...Fast as a thriller, blackly funny and very contemporary, CrocAttack! is the story of the lethal convergence of two very different lives, and a tragicomic portrait of the country exploding around them.

An Acre of Barren Ground

Jeremy Gavron

Scribner 9780743259729

March 2006

At number 30 the victim of a savage serial killer is found, and Inspector Abberline wonders whether he'll ever find the murderer they're calling Jack. At number 41 a man tries to hide his family in the shadows of a ruined London; 1500 years later, a gangster plays out the same story. At 246 a mammoth dies, and long afterwards, a giant's thighbone is discovered. Bangladeshis, Jews, Huguenots, brewers, soldiers, farmers and medieval monks - men on the run and families determined to make a new home. Each has come to Brick Lane. Each has left its ghosts.

The Book of Israel

Scribner ISBN 9780743220996

By bringing out the comic and quotidian in 130 years of Jewish history, Gavron paints a fresh portrait of a dissipating identity. He tells the story of the members of one Jewish family, described in the letters, journals and speeches of the people around them.

All the Sad Young Literary Men

Keith Gessen

Heinemann ISBN 9780099513193 

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.

Hope for New Borns

Rodge Glass

Faber & Faber ISBN 9780571238217

June 2008

Twenty-nine-year-old Lewis’s family are the definition of dysfunctional: his brothers, living estranged and unknown lives in Texas and Toronto, his mother, confined in her self-imposed silent state in a room full of fish and amphibians and his father, at work in the Victory Barber Shop where customers are surrounded by souvenirs of wartime Europe. And Lewis, caught between working at a recruitment agency, helping his father out in the barbers and keeping his mother in touch with world news.

But when he receives an email out of the blue from Christy, an old school friend, he is intrigued by her society for Hope for Newborns. Compared with the murkiness of home, the promises of her manifesto - freedom through friendship and love through sacrifice - appear so luminous, and the chance of romance so tangible.

Rodge Glass is originally from Cheshire but has lived in Scotland since 1997, where he graduated from Glasgow University with an MPhil in Creative Writing. He writes for The Herald and is a regular contributor to a number of other magazines.

His first novel, No Fireworks, was published in 2005 and was shortlisted for four awards. His biography of Alasdair Gray will be published in Autumn 2008.

36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Rebecca Goldstein

Atlantic Books ISBN 9781848871533

March 2010

Psychologist Cass Seltzer's book, "The Variety of Religious Illusion", has become a surprise runaway bestseller. Dubbed 'the atheist with a soul', Cass' sudden celebrity has upended his life and brought back the ghosts of his past, including an irrepressible former lover, a mentor with messianic fantasies and a six-year-old mathematical prodigy, heir to the dynasty of a strict fundamentalist community. Over the course of one week, Cass' theories about our need to keep faith are borne out in ways he could never have imagined.

'Rebecca Goldstein does it all. She has written a hilarious novel about people's existential agonies, a page-turner about the intellectual mysteries that obsess them. The characters in 36 Arguments For the Existence of God explore the great moral issues of our day in a novel that is deeply moving and a joy to read.' Jonathan Safran Foer

The Cookbook Collector

Allegra Goodman

Atlantic Books ISBN 9781848875395

February 2011

Two sisters, opposite in every way: twenty-eight-year-old Emily is a CFO of an internet start-up, twenty-three-year-old Jess is a graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily’s boyfriend is fantastically successful. Jess’s boyfriend is an environmental activist. But the dot-com bubble must burst, while Jess’s work on a cache

of rare cookbooks uncovers strange erotic drawings and marginalia that bring her closer to their mysterious collector...

Rich in ideas and characters, The Cookbook Collector is a novel of substitutions: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that lasts.

NOT YET AVAILABLE

Intuition

Atlantic Books ISBN 978 1 84354 841 6

March 2009

Sandy Glass is a charismatic publicity-seeking doctor.

Marion Mendelssohn is an idealistic and rigorous scientist.

They are co-directors of a cancer research lab in Boston. As mentors and supervisors to their young protégés, they demand dedication and respect in a competitive environment where funding is scarce and results elusive. So when the experiments of Cliff Bannaker, one of the youngest members of their team, begin to produce encouraging results, suggesting the very real possibility of a major breakthrough, the entire lab becomes giddy with newfound expectation. But jealousy soon breeds suspicion and Cliff’s colleague – and girlfriend – Robin Decker begins to suspect the unthinkable: that his findings are fraudulent. As Robin makes her private doubts public and Cliff maintains his innocence, a life-changing controversy engulfs the lab and everyone in it …

Allegra Goodman’s work has appeared in the New Yorker,Good Housekeeping, Slate, and the American Scholar. Named by the New Yorker as one of America’s twenty best writers under forty, she was also the recipient of a Whiting Award and the Salon magazine award for fiction. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Goodman’s previous books include Kaaterskill Falls (shortlisted for the US National Book Award) and The Family Markowitz.Intuition is her first novel to be published in the UK.

We Had it So Good

Linda Grant

Virago ISBN 9781844086375

January 2011

In 1968 Stephen Newman arrives in England from California. Sent down from Oxford, he hurriedly marries his English girlfriend Andrea to avoid returning to America and the draft board. Over the next forty years they and their friends build lives of middle-class success until the events of late middle-age and the new century force them to realise that their fortunate generation has always lived in a fool's paradise.

The Clothes on Their Backs

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.

When I Lived in Modern Times

Granta Books ISBN 9781862074040

October 2000

Winner of the 2000 Orange Prize for Fiction

In April, 1946 Evelyn Sert, a 20-year-old East End London hairdresser,

sets out for Palestine. "This is my story", she writes, "Scratch a Jew and you've got a story". Evelyn's story in Linda Grant's When I Lived in Modern Times is no less complicated than that of any other displaced European Jew in the post-war years--separated from her family and searching for some kind of reliable identity for herself in an inhospitable new land. In shining modern Bauhaus-influenced Tel Aviv she finds that she is more English than Israeli and she becomes Priscilla Jones, a peroxided English girl with an absent policeman husband. She is at her most "real", it seems, when pretending, revelling in her ability to be entirely accepted among the English women whose hair she cuts and curls. Beyond their petty and casually anti-semitic circle, by contrast, she struggles with Hebrew, the heat, the unfamiliar food and alien, exotic way of life.

But in Palestine the English are the enemy and Evelyn is drawn into a world of shifting identities, lies and secrets by her passionate Zionist boyfriend Johnny. Even then, she is never quite sure which side she is on, or where she belongs.

Linda Grant writes with quiet assurance and a strong sense of purpose. Her Tel Aviv is a city of contradictions and of hope. Her heroine is a fully believable figure, a chameleon character of a kind readily recognisable to those of us who grew up as part of the seismic displacement of peoples that accompanied World War Two, as also, probably, to anyone who has been caught up in the more recent exoduses from Bosnia, Kosova and Albania.

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 9780955253003 

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 9781846270444 

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

To the End of the Land

David Grossman

Jonathan Cape ISBN 9780224089999

September 2010

Winner of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize 2011

  Ora, a middle-aged Israeli mother, is on the verge of celebrating her son Ofer’s release from army service when he returns to the front for a major offensive. In a fit of preemptive grief and magical thinking, she sets out for a hike in the Galilee, leaving no forwarding information for the ‘notifiers’ who might darken her door with the worst possible news. Recently estranged from her husband, Ilan, she drags along an unlikely companion: their former best friend and her former lover Avram, once a brilliant artistic spirit. Avram served in the army alongside Ilan when they were young, but their lives were forever changed one weekend when the two jokingly had Ora draw lots to see which of them would get the few days’ leave being offered by their commander – a chance act that sent Avram into Egpyt and the Yom Kippur War, where he was brutally tortured as a POW. In the aftermath, a virtual hermit, he refused to keep in touch with the family and has never met the boy. Now, as Ora and Avram sleep out in the hills, ford rivers and cross valleys, avoiding all news from the front, she gives him the gift of Ofer, word by word; she supplies the whole story of her motherhood, a retelling that keeps Ofer very much alive for Ora and for the reader, and opens Avram to human bonds undreamed of in his broken world. Their walk has a ‘war and peace’ rhythm, as their conversation places the most hideous trials of war next to the daily joys and anguish of raising children. Never have we seen so clearly the reality and surreality of daily life in Israel, the currents of ambivalence about war within one household, and the burdens that fall on each generation anew. 

Grossman’s rich imagining of a family in love and crisis makes for one of the great antiwar novels of our time.

See Under: Love

Vintage ISBN 9780099289883

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.

Someone to Run With

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747568124 

2004

Earnest, awkward and painfully shy, sixteen-year-old Assaf is having the worst summer of his life. With his big sister gone and his best friend suddenly the most popular kid in their class, Assaf spends his days at a lowly summer job in Jerusalem City Hall and his evenings alone, watching television and playing games on the Internet.

One morning, Assaf's routine is interrupted by an absurd assignment: to find the owner of a stray yellow labrador.

Meanwhile on the other side of the city, Tamar, a talented singer with a lonely, tempestuous soul, undertakes an equally unpromising mission: to rescue a young drug addict from the Jerusalem underworld and, eventually, to find her dog.

Zigzag Kid

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747538097 

1998

A hijacked train whisks an imaginative young boy on an unforgettable adventure, in which he makes discoveries about his own family's past and a wild woman who rescued his Israeli policeman father from a vat of chocolate.

The Road

Vasily Grossman

Translated by Robert and Elisabeth Chandler and edited by Robert Chandler

Short Fiction and Essays

Quercus Books ISBN 9781906694258

September 2010

Vasily Grossman is widely recognized by Russian scholars as one of the outstanding literary figures of the twentieth century. The short fiction collected here - satire, comedy, tragedy and pure narrative - demonstrates all the bold intelligence, integrity and extraordinary vividness for which he has become known. Grossman is the author of the novel Life and Fate and A Writer at War, edited by Antony Beevor, the secret notebooks that detailed his four years with the Red Army, which include devastating accounts of the siege of Stalingrad and his arrival with the army at Treblinka, but he will not only be remembered for his evocation of wartime Stalingrad and his account of the Shoah.

Everything Flows

Translated by Robert Chandler

Harvill Secker ISBN 9781846552366

May 2010

Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman’s final testament, an unbearably lucid novel about human suffering written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his epic Life and Fate. 

Ivan Grigoryevich has been in the Gulag for thirty years. Released after Stalin’s death, he finds that the years of terror have imposed a collective moral slavery. He must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. But in a novel that seeks to take in the whole tragedy of Soviet history, Ivan’s story is only one among many – Grossman had too much to say, and too short a time to live, to concern himself with conventional novel-writing. 

Thus we also hear about Ivan’s cousin, Nikolay, a scientist who never let his conscience interfere with his career, and Pinegin, the informer who had Ivan sent to the camps. Then comes a series of informers, each making excuses for their inexcusable deeds – inexcusable and yet, they plead, in Stalinist Russia understandable, almost unavoidable. And at the core of the book, we find the story of Anna Sergeyevna, Ivan’s lover, who tells of her involvement as an activist in the Terror famine of 1932–3, which led to the deaths of three to five million Ukrainian peasants. 

Life and Fate

Translated by Robert Chandler

Vintage Classic ISBN 9780099506164

2006

This sweeping account of the siege of Stalingrad aims to give as panoramic a view of Soviet society during World War II as Tolstoy did of Russian life in the epoch of the Napoleonic Wars. Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, it remained unpublished at the author's death in 1964; it was smuggled into the West in 1980.

Grossman offers a bitter, compelling vision of a totalitarian regime where the spirit of freedom that arose among those under fire was feared by the state at least as much as were the Nazis. His huge cast of characters includes an old Bolshevik now under arrest, a physicist pressured to make his scientific discoveries conform to 'socialist reality' and a Jewish doctor en route to the gas chambers in occupied Russia. Ironically, just as Stalingrad is liberated from the Germans, many of the characters find themselves bound in new slavery to the Soviet government. Yet Grossman suggests that the spirit of freedom can never be completely crushed. His lengthy, absorbing novel, which rejected the compromises of a lifetime and earned its author denunciation and disgrace testifies eloquently to that spirit.

Vasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941, he became a war reporter for the Red Army newspaper Red Star and came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. Life and Fate, his masterpiece, was considered a threat to the totalitarian regime, and Grossman was told that there was no chance of the novel being published for another 200 years. Grossman died in 1964.

The World a Moment Later

Amir Gutfreund

Translated by Jessica Cohen

Toby Press ISBN 9781592642519 

November 2008

Journalist Leon Abramowitz never intended to immigrate to Palestine. Yet in 1922, four years after he was sent there from Europe to report on the lives of the pioneers, he discovers that the editor who dispatched him has run off with half of the paper's money, leaving Leon forgotten in The Promised Wilderness. This chain of events opens The World a Moment Later, which tells the story of Abramowitz and his two children. One son stays in Europe, while the other, young Haim Abramowitz, joins his father in Palestine, heading a group of orange pickers and destined to become a legend in his time. This is also the story of Yehezkel Klein, an ex-underground activist who wanted to be a "regular" Zionist but finds himself instead taking a vow of protest against his country-to never to leave his home; Lev Gutkin, a handsome Russian who arrives in Israel with a smoking gun after his long-standing plan to assassinate Stalin is thwarted when Stalin dies; David Bonhoeffer, a righteous nomad who tends to poor souls who have been neglected even by the Social Services; the late Naomi Riklin, who still controls the life of Doctor Riklin, healer of the infertile; Rivka Abramowitz, who eats only lemons and spices, and Shmuel Klein, a medal of honor-wearer who is an electrician by profession and a pyromaniac by hobby.

The World a Moment Later is the shadow book of the official Zionist lexicon. It is the book of those who were forgotten by the national narrative of Israel, collected here to be remembered. These are the people who did not enter the encyclopedias, but still, their lives contributed anger, wisdom, despair, frustration, bitterness, malice and endless love to the country. This is a fully-fledged humanistic novel which respects the myths of Theodor Herzl and Ze'ev Jabotinsky, but nonetheless is dedicated to the anonymous masses. It stems simultaneously from realism and fantasy, and provides an in-depth exploration of the question: what are we doing here?

Our Holocaust

Toby Press ISBN 9781592641393

January 2006

Amir and Effi collected relatives. With Holocaust survivors for parents and few other 'real' relatives alive, relationships operated under a "Law of Compression" in which tenuous connections turned friends into uncles, cousins and grandparents. Life was framed by Grandpa Lolek, the parsimonious and eccentric old rogue who put his tea bags through Selektion, and Grandpa Yosef, the neighborhood saint, who knew everything about everything, but refused to talk of his own past.

Amir and Effi also collected information about what happened Over There. This was more difficult than collecting relatives; nobody would tell them any details because they weren't yet Old Enough. The intrepid pair won't let this stop them, and their quest for knowledge results in adventures both funny and alarming, as they try to unearth their neighbors' stories. As Amir grows up, his obsession with understanding the Holocaust remains with him, and finally Old Enough to know, the unforgettable cast of characters that populate his world open their hearts, souls, and pasts to him...