Fiction - L

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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And remember, feedback is always welcome.

The Rowing Lesson

Anne Landsman

Granta ISBN 9781862079892

February 2008

In The Rowing Lesson, Anne Landsman has written a poignant and imaginative novel about the life and death of a beloved and complex man.

Betsy Klein rushes back to Cape Town from her home in New York to be at the bed-side of her dying father, Harry Klein.  She sits with him for his final hours and recounts to him his life story as she imagines it must have been.  Addressing him, she talks of his childhood, growing up in the Jewish community in South Africa, of his becoming a much admired doctor, his love affairs before meeting her mother and of his passion for the river Touw.  As the tale progresses, her life enters his lif, and she switches to the first person as she remembers her own memories, particularly the day when he took her out rowing.

The novel alternates between dream-like stories of the past, her father’s recent last visit to America and the present day realities of hospital death.  This is an outstanding, moving novel, distinguished by the beauty of the writing.

Anne Landsman is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Devil’s Chimney, which was nominated for four awards (the Pen/Hemingway Award, QPB’s New Voices, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and South Africa’s most prestigious literary award, the M-Net Book Prize).  She has been published in numerous publications including the American Poetry Review and the Washington Post.

Valley of Strength

Shulamit Lapid

Translated by Philip Simpson

Toby Press ISBN 9781592642304

March 2009

This scenic, moving novel, set at the end of the nineteenth century, follows the first seven years of Gai Oni—a settlement in the Galilee, the precursor to the town of Rosh Pinnah—through the life-altering trials

and experiences of a pioneer woman. Fania, a 16-year-old survivor of

a pogrom in the Ukraine, arrives in pre-state Israel with her uncle, her deranged brother and her unwanted baby, a product of rape. Upon her arrival in Jaffa, she meets Yehiel, a 26-year-old widower, the father of two, and one of the few courageous souls left in Gai Oni. Severe drought and exhausting work have driven away most of the pioneers, leaving behind only a few tenacious families.

Fania moves in with Yehiel and throws herself into the life of a peasant woman, trying to squeeze a living out of the stony ground despite hunger and disease. Wearing Arab robes, she rides through the bandit-infested country and breaks into the male-dominated worlds of commerce and politics, even of defense.

"One of the tests of the coming of age of any literature...is when it is able to take on a national historical theme convincingly," wrote Yael Feldman. Valley of Strength is an Israeli classic which ties together Israeli history and world feminism, and is beloved by critics and readers alike. It has become an integral part of Israelis’ literary education.

The Budapest Protocol

Adam LeBor

Reportage Press ISBN 9781906702120

May 2009

Nazi-occupied Budapest, winter 1944. The Russians are smashing through the German lines. Miklos Farkas breaks out of the Jewish ghetto to find food - at the Nazis’ headquarters. There he is handed a stolen copy of The Budapest Protocol, detailing the Nazis post-war plans. Miklos knows it must stay hidden for ever if he is to stay alive.

Present day Budapest. As the European Union launches the election campaign for the first President of Europe, Miklos Farkas is brutally murdered. His journalist grandson Alex buries his grief to track down the killers. He soon unravels a chilling conspiracy rooted in the dying days of the Third Reich, one that will ensure Nazi economic domination of Europe - and a plan for a new Gypsy Holocaust. The hunt is on for The Budapest Protocol. Alex is soon drawn deeper into a deadly web of intrigue and power play, a game played for the highest stakes: the very future of Europe. But Alex too is haunted. He must battle his own demons as he uncovers a shadowy alliance that the world thought had been defeated for good. Powerful, controversial and thought-provoking, The Budapest Protocol is a journey into Europe's hidden heart of darkness...

Adam LeBor is a British author and journalist, based in Budapest. He started work as a foreign correspondent in 1991, covering the collapse of Communism and the Yugoslav wars. He’s worked in more than 30 countries, enjoyed some hair-raising adventures along the way, and now reports on Central Europe for The Times. As a budding novelist and literary critic, he reviews thrillers and crime novels for the Economist, and non-fiction for the Sunday Telegraph and Literary Review. He also contributes to the Sunday Times, the New York Times, Monocle and Conde Nast Traveller. On the web he writes for More Intelligent Life, Comment is Free, Jewcy and Harry’s Place.

The Game of Opposites

Norman Lebrecht

Pantheon ISBN 9780307377258

July 2009

In an unnamed country at the end of a world war,

Paul Miller escapes from a labour camp, collapsing in a nearby village where a young woman named Alice takes him in. By the time Alice has nursed him back, to health, the war is over. With his home and family destroyed, Paul decides to remain where he is. He marries Alice, has a family, and eventually becomes the mayor of the village.

But beyond his newfound happiness, Paul cannot escape the lives he lived before - his doomed pre-War love affair, his survival in the camp, and the constant awareness that the people who are now his friends and voters ignored for years the camp in their midst. When the camp’s commander returns to the village, Paul is forced to choose between vengeance and forgiveness.

The Game of Opposites tells a universal, timeless tale of good and evil with extraordinary humanity and poignancy. It is a stunning evocation of the choices we all have to make between black, white and all shades in between.

Beaufort

Ron Leshem

Translated from Hebrew by Evan Fallenberg

Harvill Secker ISBN 9781846551307

February 2008

Beaufort, a remote and beautiful fort in southern Lebanon dating back to the Crusades, has been an outpost of the Israeli Defence Force for nearly twenty years, and now, for the teenage soldiers who live there presiding over the last moments of Israel's presence in Lebanon, it has become a world of its own, an enclave in the heart of enemy territory where boy soldiers create a state with its own rules and its own unique, outrageous, brutal language.

With a critical eye and an empathetic heart, Ron Leshem dishes up a wholly human story that takes place in conditions that are anything but. Fast-paced and brutally honest, unflinching and uproariously funny, Beaufort has been hailed – not only by critics but by the generation of soldiers who served in Lebanon during Israeli occupation – as the true voice of that sobering period.

Written as the diary of Liraz (Erez) Liberti, the head of a commando team stationed at Beaufort during the last winter of Israeli occupation, Beaufort is a revolutionary and potent look at the futility of war and death, and the courage it takes to put an end to it.This is not a story of war, but of retreat.This is a story with no enemy, only an amorphous entity that fires missiles from the surrounding mountains. And while thirteen young men propel the novel and give it life and colour, the real hero of Beaufort is fear: contagious, intoxicating, palpable fear, a word they forbid themselves from uttering. Beaufort is a devastating portrayal of a generation finding that the values and principles bestowed on them by their parents have betrayed them, and the terrifying nihilistic reality of Middle Eastern conflict.

The Jewish Husband

Lia Levi, translated from the Italian by Anthony Shugaar

Europa Editions ISBN 9781933372938
September 2009

It is 1938 and fascist Italy has imposed its infamous race laws. A young Jewish professor entertains a tormented passion for the beautiful and enigmatic Sonia. She is everything that he is not: the privileged daughter of a family that is wealthy, prominent, and above all, gentile. He wins her affections, but the price is great. He must deny his origins in order to enter that jealously guarded circle of intimates composed of her family and their friends. It is a world that has no use for him and forces him into humiliating and painful compromises.

Winner of the Moravia Price for fiction, The Jewish Husband is a bittersweet story of passion and hatred, cruelty and oppression. It is an account of a country and a time about which too little has been written, and the terrible consequences of that period’s race laws. Above all, however, it is a tender love story set at a time in which the world and its inhabitants appeared to have completely lost their ability to show tenderness.

A Tranquil Star

Primo Levi

Translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli

Penguin Classics ISBN 9780713999556

April 2007

Profound, moving and compassionate, Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing voices to emerge from the twentieth century. Here, for the first time in English, on the twentieth anniversary of his death, is a landmark selection of his fiction - all in brand new translations.

These exquisitely wrought stories open up a rich, vibrant world of wonder, adventure, resistance, love, cruelty and visceral energy, where nothing is as it seems. In 'The Fugitive' an office worker composes the most beautiful poem ever, only to find events taking on a strange life of their own; in 'Magic Paint' a group of researchers develop a paint that mysteriously protects them from misfortune, but dangerously miscalculate the outcome, and in 'Gladiators' and 'The Knall', Primo Levi chillingly explores modern-day mass violence.

Sometimes dark and haunting, sometimes wrily amusing, always rich with arresting images and curious twists of fate, these extraordinary tales are testament to one of the literary masters of our age.

A Year of Two Summers

Shaun Levin

Five Leaves Publishing ISBN 9780907123716

A Year of Two Summers comprises a – roughly chronological – series of short stories starting with adolescent sex in South Africa, to suppressed emotions in South Africa, to gay life in London.

This collection introduces an array of interesting characters: a young man experimenting with cross-dressing, a new recruit in the Israeli army fantasising about a fellow soldier and trying to live as fully human during the invasion of Lebanon, a South African woman and her Syrian boyfriend tiptoeing around each other in their London flat – unsure how to relate to each other after the birth of their child.

Shaun Levin's gay and Jewish stories have appeared in magazines in Britain and America, and, in Hebrew, in Israel, including: Modern South African Stories; Gay Times Book of Short Stories and The Slow Mirror: new fiction by Jewish Writers. He is the recipient of an Arts Council Writers Award and editor of the gay and lesbian literary journal Chroma. He is a South African writer, now living in London. He has taught creative writing and is a playwright.

Reuben Sachs
Amy Levy
Preface by Julia Neuberger

Persephone Books  ISBN 9781903155127 

This 1888 novel is about a couple who love each other, but his political ambitions demand money and she is poor: Reuben Sachs would be a fairly standard late-Victorian novel about the cruelty of the marriage market if it were not imbued with feminist polemic - Amy Levy (1861-89) was sharply critical of the empty lives led by women with, nothing to do all day except gossip, play cards and go shopping.

The setting is the Anglo-Jewish community in Bayswater, portrayed with a sardonic gaze that shocked contemporary readers. Yet the author's theme was broader, for she was in part reacting against Daniel Deronda: she believed that George Eliot had romanticised her Jewish characters and that no novelist had yet described the modern Jew with 'his surprising virtues and no less surprising vices.'

Oscar Wilde observed: 'Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make Reuben Sachs, in some sort, a classic'; Julia Neuberger writes in her Preface, 'This is a novel about women, and Jewish women, about families, and Jewish families, about snobbishness, and Jewish snobbishness'; while in the Independent on Sunday Lisa Allardice said: 'Sadder but no less sparkling than Miss Pettigrew, Reuben Sachs is another forgotten classic by an accomplished female novelist. Amy Levy might be described as a Jewish Jane Austen'.

The Romance of a Shop
Amy Levy
Edited by Susan David Bernstein
Broadview Press  ISBN 9781900355322  

The Romance of a Shop is an early "New Woman" novel about four sisters, who decide to establish their own photography business and their own home in central London after their father's death and their loss of financial security. In this novel, Amy Levy examines both the opportunities and dangers of urban experience for women in the late nineteenth century who pursue independent work rather than follow the established paths of domestic service. By outfitting her characters as photographers, Levy emphasizes the importance of the gendered gaze in this narrative of the modern city.

This Broadview edition prints for the first time since the 1880s Levy's essay on Christina Rossetti and a short story set in North London, both published in Oscar Wilde's magazine The Woman's World. Other appendices include poetry by Levy, Michael Field, Dollie Radford, and A. Mary F. Robinson, and essays on Victorian photography, literary realism, "the woman question" at the end of the nineteenth century, and the plight of women working in London.

Susan David Bernstein is a Professor of English, Jewish Studies, and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

We Are All Made of Glue

Marina Lewycka

Fig Tree ISBN 9781905490226

July 2009

Georgie Sinclair's husband has walked out, her teenaged son is obsessed with weird internet websites, and her tedious job at an online adhesives trade magazine is driving her mad. Then one night she meets Mrs Shapiro, an eccentric old Jewish émigré neighbour, rummaging through her skip, and they strike up a friendship over the reduced price shelf at the supermarket. When Mrs Shapiro is admitted to hospital after a fall, she names Georgie as her next of kin.

Exploring the semi-derelict mansion in Highbury, home also to seven stinky cats, Georgie starts to uncover the secrets of the old lady's past. But the handyman called in by Georgie to change the locks turns out to be not what he seems, and when two slimy estate agents (one with a taste for bondage) start competing to trick Mrs Shapiro into selling her rickety old house, and the social worker seems determined to commit her to a nursing home, Georgie must step in and help her new friend.

By the author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and Two Caravans

Mrs Zhivago Of Queen's Park      

Olivia Lichtenstein

Orion Books ISBN 9780752882475 

A sharp, funny and deliciously entertaining first novel about how to survive being forty, married, and just a little bit bored with your life.

Meet Chloe Zhivago, 43 and definitely not counting. Married for what feels like all eternity to Greg who tests his memory in infuriating ways, for example hiding the kettle from himself in the drum of the washing machine, Chloe is a successful psychotherapist with two children and a Famous Friend from hell. She's got it all. So why does she want to rub her life out and start again? Is this it? She asks herself. Will I never sleep with another man again? When Chloe meets temptation in the shape of Ivan, does she dare risk a passionate Russian romance before gravity wins the battle with her face and figure? Can she get away with one glorious, final fling? Dr Zhivago didn't. And just look what happened to Anna Karenina…

This is a razor sharp, wonderfully funny, sexy novel that asks a serious question - how do you keep love alive during a long marriage? - and answers it with poignancy and pure delicious comedy.

Holding My Breath

Sidura Ludwig

Tindal Street Press ISBN 9780955138478
March 2008

Growing up – with her mother Goldie, father Saul, her Baba and two maternal aunts – on McAdam Avenue in Winnipeg, young Beth Levy tells us: ‘I have become my family’s narrator.’ Shared stories, overheard conversations and the litany of things unsaid fuse together in Beth’s story, which evokes a whole community.

There’s Goldie – upholder of middle-class values and traditions; there’s her responsible, rather dowdy Aunt Carrie, a skilled seamstress with a secret past. And there’s her Aunt Sarah who takes Beth to the open-air pool: summer excursions hot with the promise of sexuality. But all the while, her dead Uncle Phil’s diaries entice Beth – into a fascination with the night sky. Despite her mother’s discouragement – ‘Space is not for little girls, Beth’ – and the difficulties of navigating between the old world and the new, Beth is determined to hold onto her dream of becoming an astronomer.