Fiction - H

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.

Secret Territory

Miriam Halahmy

Rafael Q Publishers ISBN 9780754400646

A journey to the Promised Land - a circular journey, across generations, charting the dreams and aspirations of father and daughter. Feeling she should have been born in the homeland, Eve travels to Israel in search of an identity, unaware that her quest will painfully expose her family's hidden history. Her father Jack's story is of London in the forties - a time of idealism, political terrorism and conflicting values.

In their separate ways, both confront the discord between collective ideals and personal needs; both must make their choices and live with them. This is their story - an honest and evocative account of what it means and feels to be Jewish in the modern world.

Adverbs
Daniel Handler
Fourth Estate  ISBN 9780007181285 

Adverbs marks the return of Daniel Handler to adult fiction as he tackles life's most complicated and compelling noun: love. In a series of intersecting narratives that explore variations of that ineffable feeling, Handler crafts a moving and shifting story exploring the frustrating glory of this most troublesome of emotions.

Two friends, one dying and one lonely; an adolescent's first homosexual stirrings for his sister's boyfriend; a doomed, enormously inappropriate tryst between a taxi driver and his passenger; a high-school crush that falls painfully short of a movie projected on a grungy screen. Handler's characters experience love in all of its dark, triumphant, devastating and sneaky forms. In Adverbs, Daniel Handler reveals to us how the most universal of themes is also the most unknown.

'Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner. We breathed it in, particularly me.'

Little Face

Sophie Hannah

Hodder & Stoughton ISBN: 9780340840320   

Alice`s baby is two weeks old when she leaves the house without her for the first time. On her eager return, she finds the front door open, her husband asleep on their bed upstairs. She rushes into their baby`s room and screams. `This isn`t our baby! Where`s our baby?` Her increasingly hostile husband swears she must be either mad or lying, and the DNA test is going to take a week.

One week later, before the test has been taken, Alice and the baby have disappeared. Run away, abducted, murdered? The police who dismissed her baby swap story must find out, and as they do they find dark incidents in David`s past - like the murder of his ex-wife...

Hurting Distance

Hodder & Stoughton ISBN: 9780340840344

August 2007

Three years ago, something terrible happened to Naomi Jenkins – so terrible that she never told anybody.

Now Naomi has another secret – the man she has fallen passionately in love with, unhappily married Robert Haworth. When Robert vanishes without trace, Naomi knows he must have come to harm. But the police are less convinced, particularly when Robert`s wife insists he is not missing.

In desperation, Naomi has a crazy idea. If she can`t persuade the police that Robert is in danger, perhaps she can convince them that he is a danger to others. Then they will have to look for him – urgently. Naomi knows how describe in detail the actions of a psychopath. All she needs to do is dig up her own troubled past . . .

The Believers

Zoe Heller

Fig Tree ISBN 9780141024677  

September 2008

A comic, tragic, supremely entertaining novel about one family's struggles with the consolations of faith and the trials of doubt

When New York radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff falls gravely ill, his wife Audrey uncovers a terrible secret about him. So begins a year filled with revelations, in the course of which Audrey, her two daughters, Karla and Rosa, and adopted son Lenny, will be forced to examine the limits of their faith in other people, in political ideas and in God.

A serious, moving and often very funny family novel, The Believers will surprise and delight.

Zoë Heller is the author of two novels, Everything You Know and Notes on a Scandal, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003. She lives in New York.

The Lazarus Project

Aleksandar Hemon

Picador ISBN 9780330458412 
August 2008

On 2 March 1908, nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, a Russian Jewish immigrant to Chicago, tried to deliver a letter to the home of the city’s Chief of Police, George Shippy. Instead of taking the letter, Shippy shot Averbuch twice, killing him.

Lazarus Averbuch, Shippy claimed, was an anarchist assassin and an agent of foreign operatives who wanted to bring the United States to its knees. His sister, Olga, was left alone and bereft in a city – and country – seething with political and ethnic tensions.

In the twenty-first century, Brik, a young Bosnian writer in Chicago, becomes obsessed with finding out the truth of what happened to Lazarus. And so Brik and his friend Rora, a charming and unreliable photographer, set off on a journey back to Lazarus Averbuch’s birthplace, through a history of pogroms and poverty and a present of gangsters and prostitutes.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Question of Bruno, which appeared on Best Books of 2000 lists nationwide, won several literary awards, and was published in eighteen countries, and Nowhere Man. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon arrived in Chicago in 1992, began writing in English in 1995, and his work now appears regularly in the New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, Paris Review and Best American Short Stories.

The White Road and Other Stories

Tania Hershman

Salt Publishing ISBN 9781844714759
September 2008

What links a café in Antarctica, a factory for producing electronic tracking tags and a casino where gamblers can wager their shoes? They're among the multiple venues where award-winning writer Tania Hershman sets her unique tales in this spellbinding debut collection.

Fleeing from tragedy, a bereaved mother opens a cafe on the road to the South Pole. A town which has always suffered extreme cold enjoys sudden warmth. A stranger starts plaiting a young woman's hair. A rabbi comes face to face with an angel in a car park. An elderly woman explains to her young carer what pregnancy used to mean before science took over. A middle-aged housewife overcomes a fear of technology to save her best friend. A desperate childless woman resorts to extreme measures to adopt. A young man's potential is instantly snuffed out by Nature's whims. A lonely widow bakes cakes in the shape of test tubes and DNA.

A number of these stories are inspired by articles from science magazines, taking fact as their starting points and wondering what might happen if . . .? In these surreal, lyrical stories, many of which are only a few pages long, Tania Hershman allows her imagination free reign, as her characters navigate through love, death, friendship, spirituality, mental illness and the havoc wreaked by the weather.

Tania Hershman was born in London and in 1994 moved to Jerusalem, where she now lives with her partner. She is a former science journalist and her award-winning short stories combine her two loves: fiction and science. Many of Tania Hershman’s stories, which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in print and online, are inspired by articles from popular science magazines. In November 2007, she founded The Short Review, a unique website dedicated to reviewing short story collections, which attracts several hundred visitors a week. Concerned about the environmental impact of her book, Tania is partnering with Eco-Libris, who will plant a tree for every copy. For further information, visit Tania’s websites: www.taniahershman.com and www.thewhiteroadand
otherstories.com.

The House of Rajani

Alon Hilu

Translated from the Hebrew by Evan Fallenberg

Harvill Secker ISBN 9781846552991

February 2010

The year is 1895, Jaffa. Salah Rajani, a troubled Muslim boy living in a dilapidated mansion surrounded by orange groves, suffers from peculiar visions about a disaster which is set to befall his people. His life is changed by the arrival of a handsome young man, a dynamic Jewish settler, new to the city, by the name of Isaac Luminsky. Luminsky covets both the fertile lands of the Rajani estate and Salah's beautiful mother Afifa, and his friendship with the boy is destined to lead to violence and tragedy.

This rich and colourful novel is made up of the two opposing journals of Hilu's intriguing and extraordinary protagonists as they negotiate love, honour and betrayal in the changing world of nineteenth-century Palestine.

Death of a Monk

Vintage ISBN 9780099490647

Damascus 1840. Aslan Farhi’s quiet, sheltered life is turned upside down when his brutish father, a wealthy businessman, decides he should wed. Aslan finds the wedding a painful ordeal, lightened only by the presence of the exotic dancer, Umm-Jihan, by whom he becomes entranced.

Unable to come to terms with his wife, who has moved into the family home, Aslan visits his friend Suleiman the barber who tells him of the Maqha café, a place strictly forbidden to Jews, on the border between the Christian and Muslim Quarters. Here in this seedy den of vice Aslan meets Umm-Jihan again. This vision of beauty awakens a dormant desire for women. But all is not as it seems and Aslan is soon deeply upset; confused and at a loss he embarks on ill-advised liaison with another man, with disastrous consequences.

The Damascus of Death of A Monk is a rich and vibrant place; lively, sensual and at the same time teeming with fear and hostility. Through the dark alleyways and bustling marketplaces Hilu unfolds a story charged with emotional and sexual conflict. A powerful literary tour de force from a unique new voice; at times wickedly funny, at others painfully sad, but beautifully told throughout. A stunning debut.

The Welsh Girl

Peter Ho Davies

Sceptre ISBN 9780340938270 

May 2007

  In 1944, a German Jewish refugee is sent to Wales to interview

Rudolf Hess; in Snowdonia, a seventeen-year-old girl, the daughter

of a fiercely nationalistic shepherd, dreams of the bright lights of an English city; and in a nearby POW camp, a German soldier struggles

to reconcile his surrender with his sense of honour. As their lives intersect, all three will come to question where they belong and where their loyalties lie.

Peter Ho Davies`s thought-provoking and profoundly moving first novel traces a perilous wartime romance as it explores the bonds of love and duty that hold us to family, country, and ultimately our fellow man. Vividly rooted in history and landscape, The Welsh Girl reminds us anew of the pervasive presence of the past, and the startling intimacy of the foreign.

Illuminations

Eva Hoffman

Harvill Secker ISBN 9781846551550

June 2008

Isabel Merton is a renowned concert pianist, whose playing is marked by rare intensity, and for whom each performance is a plunge into the compelling world of the music. At the height of her career, she feels increasingly torn between the expressive musical realm she inhabits, and the fragmented life she leads as an itinerant artist, with its frequent flights, anonymous hotels and fortuitous, arbitrary encounters.

Away from her New York home on a European tour, Isabel meets Anzor Islikhanov, a political exile from war-torn Chechnya driven by a bitter sense of injustice and a powerful desire to help and avenge his people. As their paths cross in several cities, they are drawn to each other both by their differences, and their seemingly parallel passions – until a menacing incident forces her to re-evaluate his actions and her own feelings - and throws her into a creative crisis.

In this fiercely lyrical novel, Hoffman explores the luminous and dark faces of romanticism; our often unadmitted need for more than personal meaning; and the place and force of art in a world riven with violence.

The Archivist's Story

Travis Holland

Bloomsbury 9780747593201 
August 2008

It is Moscow, in 1939. In the recesses of the infamous Lubyanka prison, a young archivist is sent to verify the authorship of an unfinished story, confiscated from one of the many political prisoners there. The writer is Isaac Babel. The great author of "Red Cavalry" is spending his last days forbidden to write, his final works consigned to the archivist, Pavel Dubrov - who will ultimately be charged with destroying them. Pavel, a former schoolmaster and a lover of literature, a reluctant minion in Stalin's system, makes a reckless decision: he will save the last stories of the writer he admires, whatever the cost. Pavel's daring in the face of a vast bureaucracy of evil invigorates a life that had slowly lost its meaning, even as it guarantees his almost certain undoing. A story of suspicion, courage and unexpected grace, "The Archivist's Story" is ultimately a tribute to the enduring power of the written word.

Travis Holland has an MFA from the University of Michigan, where he was twice awarded the Avery Jules Hopwood Award as well as the Meijer Award. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Glimmer Train and Five Points. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This is his first novel.

All Other Nights

Dara Horn

Old Street Publishing ISBN 9781906964054
July 2009

How is tonight different from all other nights? For Jacob Rappaport, a Jewish soldier in the Union army during the Civil War, it is a question his commanders have already answered for him -- on Passover, 1862, he is ordered to murder his own uncle in New Orleans, who is plotting to assassinate President Lincoln. After this harrowing mission, Jacob is recruited to pursue another enemy agent, the daughter of a Virginia family friend. But this time, his assignment isn’t to murder the spy, but to marry her. Their marriage, with its riveting and horrifying consequences, reveals the deep divisions that still haunt American life today.

Based on real personalities like Judah Benjamin, the Confederacy’s Jewish Secretary of State and spymaster, and on historical facts and events ranging from an African-American spy network to the dramatic self-destruction of the city of Richmond, All Other Nights is a gripping and suspenseful story of men and women driven to the extreme limits of loyalty and betrayal. It is also a brilliant parable of the rift in America that lingers a century and a half later: between those who value family and tradition first, and those dedicated, at any cost, to social and racial justice for all.

Layered with meaning, All Other Nights presents the most American of subjects with originality and insight -- and the possibility of reconciliation that might yet await us.

The World to Come

Hamish Hamilton 9780141027425 

August 2007

An intoxicating novel that will take you back into the past, deep into the present and forwards into a meaningful future

A million-dollar Chagall painting is stolen during a singles’ event at a New York museum. The painting has an unusual history, and there is an unlikely thief – Benjamin Ziskind, a lonely former child prodigy who now writes questions for TV shows and who believes the painting once belonged to his family.

Benjamin’s moment of apparent madness in stealing the painting is just one such moment in a web of riveting stories. For him, for his family and for Chagall, life is a breathtaking collision course of past, present and future, and ‘the world to come’ starts right now.

Dara Horn was born in New Jersey in 1977 and now lives in New York City. She  is the author of In the Image, which won the National Jewish Book Award, The Edward Lewis Wallant Award and the Reform Judaism Prize for Fiction.

This is an absolutely magical book. Dara Horn tells the enthralling story of three generations from the Russia of pogroms to today’s New York, interspersed with Yiddish tales, the Vietnam war and Chernobyl. Her novel is full of humanity, longing for a lost world and hope for the one to come. Highly recommended.

Geraldine D’Amico

The Mark of the Angel

Nancy Huston

Vintage ISBN 9780099283645

August 2000

This extraordinarily compelling novel centres on an intense, adulterou s love affair between Saffie, a silent young German woman who is first maid and then wife to a famous flautist, and Andras, the Jewish flute -mender to whose little atelier she takes her husband's flute to be me nded. Their liaison doesn't break the same taboos as The Reader but their love is 'forbidden' not only in the sense that it's adulterous, but also because she always takes her baby son along in his pram, as a cover and protection. Both the German woman and the Jew have been damaged by WWII; she more traumatically and personally than he - watching her mother's rape and branding by Russian soldiers, being raped herself, and then finding out after the war that her gentle scientist father was implicated in Nazi experiments with drug trials. Their stories unfolds in Paris at the height of the Algerian war in the 1950s, bringing the madness of war back into the present. The flute-mender, left-wing and committed, is involved on the fringes of the Algerian liberation movement in Paris. The ending is tragic and devastating, when the husband discovers the affair.

Fault Lines

Atlantic Books ISBN 9781843547563

March 2008

Sol is a highly gifted six-year-old; his adoring mother believes he is destined for greatness. Yet he is also unsettling, chillingly un-childlike. He bears the same birthmark as his father, grandmother and great-grandmother had before him. When Sol and his family make an unexpected trip to Germany, terrible secrets start to emerge.Narrated by children in each generation of the family, "Fault Lines" traces their history back through the years, from California to New York, from Haifa to Toronto and Munich. As dormant family secrets are awakened, shock waves reverberate from a hidden past into a fragile present.Domestic in focus and epic in scope, "Fault Lines" is a vibrant, richly drawn and captivating piece of storytelling. It shows what can happen when past and present collide. Birthmarks are not all that can be passed down through a family line...