Fiction - M

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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The Flood

David Maine

Canongate ISBN 9781841959658

In this brilliant debut novel, Noe's family-his wife,sons and daughters-in-law-tell what it's like to live with a man touched by God, while struggling against events that cannot be controlled or explained.

For when Noe orders his sons to build an ark, he can't tell them where the wood will come from, just that God will provide. When he sends his daughter-in-law out to gather the animals, he can offer no directions, money, or protection. Just faith. But once the rain starts, they all come to realise that the harshest test of their faith is just beginning.

The novel is a wickedly funny retelling of one of the most dramatic stories known to mankind. At its core it's about a family caught in the midst of an extraordinary event and David Maine infuses this timeless tale with humanity, tension and wit.

Fallen

Canongate ISBN 9871841958842

The story of Cain and Abel, and Adam and Eve and the world's original family.

Beginning with the murder of Abel by his brother, Fallen rewinds through fury and jealousy, lust and despair, right back to the bite from

the apple and mankind's first taste of shame.
From the bones of this age-old tale, David Maine weaves a compulsively readable and startlingly modern human drama of love, betrayal and rage. We know the end of the story - but how did it really begin?

The Book of Samson

Canongate

ISBN: 9871841958859

Samson begins his narrative imprisoned by the Philistines, blind and chained, his hair shorn and his strength sapped. His story is one of great feats of violence and even greater hubris. He believes that he has been sent by God to deliver his people from the heathens, and so strong is his conviction in his divine mission that his behaviour verges on the psychopathic. He kills Philistines and Canaanites, razing their crops and villages and wreaks murderous havoc whenever his God?though more often he himself?has been dishonoured. His delight in killing for God knows no bounds, and his Herculean speed and strength seems unstoppable, but then there's Dalila…

David Maine contemporizes this mythic tale and questions the kind of zealot who delights in killing for God, the kind of man who denies humanity to his victims. In Samson's egomaniacal bloodlust Maine holds the mirror up to the actions of those running our world now, and in the suicidal bringing down of the twin pillars of the temple presages the defining event of the twenty-first century.

The Fixer

Bernard Malamud

Penguin Classics ISBN 9780140185157

Kiev, in the years before World War I, is a hotbed of anti-Semitism. When a 12-year-old Russian boy is found stabbed to death, his body drained of blood, the accusation of ritual murder is made against the Jews. Yokov Bok, a carpenter, is blamed, arrested and imprisoned without indictment.

Talking to the Enemy

Avner Mandelman

Seven Stories/ Turnaround ISBN 9781583227299  

May 2007

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has shaped the consciousness of a generation, but never before has it been brought to life in such vivid and telling prose. Part Tim O’Brien and part Bernard Malamud, Avner Mandelman’s Talking to the Enemy ranges from boisterously entertaining tales of domestic squabbles to dark narratives from disillusioned soldiers. Awarded the Jewish Book Award when it was published in Canada and supplemented with recent stories, Talking to the Enemy is the powerful American debut of an international favorite.

“Pity” draws the reader through the descending layers of horror of an Israeli soldier who is party to an assassination attempt gone terribly wrong. In “Terror” a man recalls a traumatic childhood incident that taught him family comes first—before justice, before fear. On a lighter note, “Mish-Mash” is a comical tornado set off when a winning lottery ticket is discovered in a less-than-conventional family, best described as “Sholem Aleichem writes Peyton Place on speed” (Montreal Gazette). Underneath their often brash exteriors Mandelman’s characters search for reconciliation and fulfillment in a land where conflict is a part of everyday life. Mandelman ensnares readers in intense plot-driven narratives that are pierced through with unexpected and ingenious twists. Beneath the surface of the often sparse prose lies evocative, unanswered questions about humanity. Every story delivers a thoroughly engrossing read with an unforgettable ending.

Born in Israel in 1947, Avner Mandelman served in the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War and has for four decades split his time between Paris, California, and Canada. Mandelman’s stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories 1995, The Journey Prize Stories, and The 1996 Pushcart Prize XX.

Playing Days

Benjamin Markovits

Faber and Faber ISBN 9780571253173

Fresh out of college and uncertain how to proceed with life, the narrator of Ben Markovits' Playing Days finds himself drifting towards a career that once obsessed his father - professional basketball. Gaining a place on a minor league German team, he leaves Texas and lands in the small rather desolate town of Landshut, playing basketball with an eclectic group of teammates, training for most of the day and then trying to find ways to fill the rest of it. 

It's an odd, isolated existence, punctuated by the intense excitement - and often intense disappointment - of the game. But then he meets Anke, a young single mother who happens to be the former wife of one of his teammates; and their tentative, burgeoning relationship becomes as significant and as life changing as the game itself.  

Beautifully written, Playing Days is entirely recognisable in its depiction of the first long summer after university. Tinged with the melancholy and nostalgia of early steps into adulthood, it's the story of a young man's first experience of adult love, and of the discovery of his own limitations.

The Glass Room

Simon Mawer

Little Brown ISBN 9781408700778

January 2009

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2009.

Cool. Balanced. Modern. The precisions of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession and the fear of failure – thse are things that happen in the Glass Room.

High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a marvel of steel and glass and onyx. Built specially for newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile, it is one of the wonders of modernist architecture. But the radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 that the house seems to engender quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of World War Two gather. Eventually, as Nazi troops enter the country, the family, accompanied by Viktor’s lover Kata and her child Marika, must flee.

Yet the family’s exile does not signify the end of this spectacular building. It slips from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet and finally back to the Czechoslovak state, the crystalline perfection of the Glass Room always exerting a gravitational pull on those who know it. It becomes a laboratory, a shelter from the storm of war, and a place where the broken and the ruined find some kind of comfort, until with the collapse of Communism, the Landauers are finally drawn back to where their story began.

The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump

Aharon Megged

Translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden

Toby Press ISBN 9781592641963

November 2007

A merciless literary critic may seem like a demonic figure to a writer anxiously awaiting the ultimate critical review of his work. Such is the plight of Kalman Keren, a writer who lives in an apartment building in Tel Aviv. When Keren notices Professor Shatz coming up the stairs of his building he almost goes into shock. Shatz is the hated literary critic who is every writer’s nightmare, and now he and his wife have moved into the apartment above Keren’s!

The Living on the Dead

Translated from the Hebrew by Misha Louvish

Toby Press ISBN 9781592641338

October 2005

The Living on the Dead is the history of a book that has not been written. Its central theme is the debt of the living to the dead, and in particular the effects on the heirs of Israel of their new and dearly bought nationality.

Jonas is a writer, on trial for breach of contract. Commissioned to write the biography of a national hero, Davidov, he has after eighteen months and thousands of pounds of payment produced not a word. Despite the mountains of research and testimonies, he is oppressed and even rebuked by his subject's sanctity... even when he perceives that the idol's feet are of clay. He simply cannot write the book of the legend of Davidov.

Mandrakes from the Holy Land

Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston

Toby Press ISBN 9781592640577

September 2005

In 1906 a young Englishwoman, a painter named BeatriceCampbell-Bennett, arrives in Palestine, intending to study and paint the flowers that are mentioned in the Old Testament. She is particularly interested in the mandrake, with which Leah bought a night of love with Jacob. Traveling with an Arab companion around the country, still under Ottoman rule, the Christian tourist becomes acquainted with everyday life in the Holy Land during the Jewish immigration wave known as the 'Second Aliyah.' Combining fact and fiction in the form of diary entries and letters, the novel reveals the heroine's complex and unstable personality. It transpires that Beatrice's religiosity is bound up with her erotic attraction for Vanessa Stephen (Virginia Woolf's sister), and her life in the Bloomsbury Group. The Holy Land awakens her repressed passions and incipient madness, culminating in a double rape, once by an Arab in Nablus and once by a philandering Jew. Megged combines motifs from both the Old and the New Testaments with psychological insights and mythological patterns, unfolding a gripping, colorful tapestry of Palestine at the start of the century.

Foiglman

Translated from the Hebrew by Marganit Weinberger

Toby Press ISBN 9781592640324

December 2003

Zvi Arbel is an Israeli historian whose chosen field is Jewish history. His work is read by the Yiddish poet Foiglman, a Holocaust survivor who sends Arbel a volume of his own poetry. The relationship that springs up between the two men is one of ambivalence and fascination; the reserved Israeli historian alternatingly sympathetic and suspicious, affectionate and resentful, towards the enthusiastic but tormented poet. Arbel embarks on an effort to get Foiglman's poetry translated into Hebrew, but as Foiglman begins to monopolize more and more of his time, the relationship drives a wedge between Arbel and his wife that leads to tragedy.

Aharon Megged came to Tel Aviv from Poland at the age of 6. He was a kibbutz member for 12 years, and then worked as a literary editor and journalist. Megged began publishing in 1938. He has served as the Israeli cultural attache in London, and was writer in residence at Haifa University and Oxford. Between '80-'87 he was the president of the Israeli center of PEN. His fiction has won numerous awards, including the French Wizo prize for Foiglman, the Bialik, Brenner, and Agnon Prizes, and most recently, the coveted Israel Prize of 2003. He lives in Tel Aviv.

The Pillar of Salt

Albert Memmi

Beacon Press ISBN 9780807083277

Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, Memmi's young hero and narrator, is a Jewish native of French-colonized Tunisia. His rich description of ``the almond bitterness of blackened calfskins'' in his father's tanning shop, among other things, betrays Memmi's nostalgia for his own childhood in a Tunis ghetto. By the eve of his bar mitzvah, however, Alexandre confesses to an acrid ``distance between myself and the tribe.'' Questioning the Judaism of his family and community, he finds it ``an incoherent mixture of Berber superstitions . . . and rites that could not satisfy the smallest spiritual need.'' An exceptional student, Alexandre forsakes tradition for an intellectual life. But unable to assimilate the ways of his wealthy, gentile classmates, he feels isolated at school. Memmi's ( The Colonizer and the Colonized ) semiautobiographical novel powerfully distinguishes itself through its unblinking examination of the contradictions that thwart even Alexandre's most altruistic ambitions. After volunteering to work in a labor camp during WW II, Alexandre discovers that the class and ethnic distinctions haunting him continued within the camp. Ultimately, only exile and fiction writing--``mastering . . . life by recreating it''--can avert despair. Yet like Lot's wife, whose backward glance turned her into salt, Alexandre's existentialist self-revision only lands him in the prison of his own solitude.

Don Juan de la Mancha or the Education of Lust

Robert Menasse

Alma Books ISBN 9781846880810

February 2009

“You can only be happy with your first woman or

with your last,” announces Nathan’s father, thus summarizing the seducer’s dilemma. Nathan too is a seducer, albeit in different times. An editor for a Viennese newspaper, he maintains an emancipated marriage and an equally emancipated affair, paying frequent visits to his psychotherapist. Whereas Nathan’s father sought happiness in women and Nathan’s mother found unhappiness in men, Nathan intends to do everything quite differently. But what is he doing differently? Nothing.

More entertaining and facetious than ever, Robert Menasse paints a vivid portrait of the post-’68 generation and a society “that cannot even sell a bottle of mineral water without viewing the goods from an erotic angle”.

Translated in more than twenty countries, Robert Menasse is one of the leading voices in Austrian literature, and the recipient of numerous literary awards.

When We Were Bad

Charlotte Mendelson

Picador ISBN 9780330449298 

May 2007

Claudia Rubin is in her heyday. Wife, mother, rabbi and sometime moral voice of the nation, it is she whom everyone wants to be with at her older son’s glorious February wedding. Until Leo becomes a bolter and the heyday of the Rubin family begins to unravel . . .

His calm, married, more mature sister, Frances, tries to hold the centre together but the stresses, for Frances, force her to re-examine her own middle way and lead to a decision as shocking in its way as Leo’s has been.

Meanwhile, Claudia's husband Norman has, uncharacteristically, a secret to hide – a secret whose imminent unveiling he can do nothing about . . .

A warm, poignant and true portrayal of a London family in crisis, in love, in denial and – ultimately – in luck.

Charlotte Mendelson was born in 1972 and grew up in Oxford. Her first short story was published in New Writing 7 and broadcast on Radio 4. She has written two novels, Love in Idleness and Daughters of Jerusalem. She lives in London with her family.

The Winter Vault

Anne Michaels

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747598091
May 2009

Egypt, 1964. The great temple at Abu Simbel must be rescued from the rising waters of the Aswan Dam. Block by block it is to be dismantled and resurrected sixty metres higher. This most delicate and daunting of tasks is overseen by Avery, a young engineer who at the same time is carefully, and joyfully, constructing a shared life with his new wife, Jean.

But not everything can be saved once the floodgates have opened. Villages will be deluged. Graves will be moved. Thousands will be exiled from their ancient homes and from the river that has been their lifeblood, and no feat of engineering can prevent this.

As the temple is taken apart and rebuilt, Avery and Jean suffer a terrible loss of their own. Their separate journeys through the landscape of grief will take them from Egypt, to Canada, to lands that have been flooded and reconfigured and homes that have been lost, to a guerrilla painter of the past whose story of destruction, reconstruction and replication in war-devastated Poland is built out of equal parts hope and despair.

Weaving historical moments with the quiet intimacy of human lives, The Winter Vault tells of the ways in which we salvage what we can from the violence of life. It is the story of a husband and a wife trying to find their way back to each other; of people and nations displaced and uprooted and of the myriad means by which we all seek out a place we can call home. It is a breathtaking and heartbreaking novel about the inescapability of memories, the devastation of loss, and the restorative power of love.

Fugitive Pieces

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747534969
September 1997

An amazing novel, using extraordinary language to give the reader a horribly vicarious sense of the psychological trauma of war.

It is just months before the Nazi occupation of Poland, and, from the mud of a buried city, Jakob Beer, an orphaned Jewish boy, finds himself rescued by an unlikely saviour. He is saved by the geologist and humanist Athos Roussos, who takes him to his Greek island home where he becomes his student. But the trauma of Jakob’s early life refuses to leave him. Living forever in the shadow of the Holocaust, although Jakob has escaped the most terrible fate of all, he must yet steel himself to excavate the horrors of his own history.

Farewell Leicester Square

Betty Miller

Persephone Books ISBN 9781903155035

Betty Miller (Jonathan Miller's mother) wrote this, her fourth novel, in 1935. But her publisher, Victor Gollancz, 'turned the book down .at,' wrote Neal Ascherson in The New York Review of Books. 'It seems most likely that he saw it as terrifyingly provocative, not only an attack on the solid English assimilation of his own family but a tactless outburst against the English at precisely the moment, two years after Hitler's assumption of power, when their tolerance and hospitality were most needed.'

In the novel Alec Berman escapes from his restrictive Jewish family in Brighton, and although he has a successful career as a film-maker (perhaps modelled on that of Alexander Korda) and marries the very English Catherine, he always feels a 'Dago: Jew: Outsider.' 'Yet,' continued Neal Ascherson, 'the rejection is not really the refusal of a snobbish Gentile world fully to accept him. The rejecting force comes from within himself.' 'A thought-provoking insight into anti-semitism between the wars,' wrote the Guardian, 'not the violent prejudice of Mosley's fascists, but the discreet discrimination of the bourgeoisie.'

A fascinating book, much recommended. GDA

Sashenka

Simon Montefiore

Bantam Press ISBN 9780593056370

June 2008

Winter, 1916: In St Petersburg, Russia on the brink of revolution. Outside the Smolny Institute for Noble Young Ladies, an English governess is waiting for her young charge to be released from school. But so are the Tsar’s secret police…

Beautiful and headstrong, Sashenka Zeitlin is just sixteen. As her mother parties with Rasputin and her dissolute friends, Sashenka slips into the frozen night to play her part in a dangerous game of conspiracy and seduction.

Twenty years on, Sashenka has a powerful husband with whom she has two children. Around her people are disappearing, but her own family is safe. But she's about to embark on a forbidden love affair which will have devastating consequences.

Sashenka's story lies hidden for half a century, until a young historian goes deep into Stalin's private archives and uncovers a heart-breaking tale of passion and betrayal, savage cruelty and unexpected heroism - and one woman forced to make an unbearable choice.

Simon Montefiore is a historian, novelist and television presenter. His book, Catherine the Great and Potemkin was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper, and Marsh Biography Prizes. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year prize at the 2004 British Book Awards, and Young Stalin was chosen as Biography of the Year in the 2008 Costa Book Awards. He lives in London with his wife, the novelist, Santa Montefiore, and their two children.