Fiction - O - Q

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.

The Conversion

Joseph Olshan

Arcadia Books ISBN 9781905147984
July 2008

Russell Todaro, a young American translator, moves to Paris to take stock of his life and goals only to further lose himself in the surprising twists fate has in store for him. One night, two men waving guns and knives break and enter their Paris hotel room, terrorizing Russell and his much older companion, a famous American poet named Edward Cannon. The intruders, not finding what they seemingly expected, leave without further incident but the baffling, traumatic events overwhelm Cannon who dies in his sleep later that night. Now Russell is left to ponder the meaning of the attack, what to do with the poet’s unfinished, problematic memoir and, perhaps most importantly, how to reconstruct and move forward with his own life.

Hearing of the disturbing circumstances of Cannon’s death, an Italian writer, Marina Vezzoli, invites Russell to recuperate at her villa in Tuscany. But what at first seems like a generous invitation slowly reveals itself to be a calculated offer. As Russell’s stay in Italy lengthens, he begins to realize that the people in his life are using or manipulating him, most of all the poet’s New York publishers who, against the dying poet’s wishes, are trying to acquire his unfinished manuscript. Looming over everything is the long and fascinating legacy of Villa Guidi, where during Word War II a Jewish family hid in the subterranean floors, later undergoing a conversion to Catholicism. In an echo of this dramatic history, Russell is forced to undergo a conversion of his own in order to find redemption and meaning in his life.

The Invisible Bridge

Julie Orringer

Viking ISBN 9780670914586

July 2010

In September 1937 Andras, a young Hungarian student, leaves his family and heads for Paris on a scholarship to study architecture. Before he sets off he is given a mysterious letter to post on arrival in Paris. It is addressed to an Hungarian woman and no reason is given why it cannot be posted from Budapest. When Andras arrives in Paris he becomes vitally aware of his poverty, particularly when he enters the home of a richer Hungarian emigre Klara Morgenstern. She is a young widowed woman, and he finds himself falling in love with her. As they begin to meet regularly it is clear that Klara is hiding a terrifying secret, related to the mysterious letter that Andras posted on arrival, which means she is trapped in Paris as war looms closer. And, as Andras and his fellow students' lives become ever more vulnerable in the shadow of war, the group must shatter in order to survive. Andras is forced home to a labour camp, his brother disappears and Klara risks everything to return to Hungary to be close to her lover.

How to Breathe Under Water

Penguin ISBN 9780141015088

In her dazzling first book Julie Orringer dives into the private world of childhood and immerses us in its fears and longings: the jealous friendships and the bitter sibling battles; the parents that row and the boys that won't dance with you. Then in a voice that is equally tender and compassionate, she reminds us of those rare, exhilarating moments of victory.

Scenes from a Village Life

Amos Oz

Translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange

Chatto & Windus ISBN 9780701185503

July 2011

Amos Oz’s new fiction presents a surreal and unsettling portrait of a village in Israel. A picture of the community takes shape across seven stories, in which a group of characters appear and return. Each villager is searching for something, yet in this almost dreamlike world nothing is certain, nothing is resolved. 

An old man grumbles to his daughter about the unexplained digging and banging he hears under the house at night. A stranger turns up at a man’s door, to persuade him that they must get rid of his ageing mother in order to sell the house. A man goes to his neighbours for regular evenings of music and old pioneer songs, but is overwhelmingly drawn to the tragic heart of the house.

Behind each episode is another, hidden story – a glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday existence. The book concludes with an eighth story, shocking and strange, from another place and a distant time. In beautifully simple, poetic language, Amos Oz peers into the darkness of our lives in this powerful, hypnotic work.

Rhyming Life and Death

Translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange

Vintage ISBN 9780701182281

February 2010

The novel centres around 8 hours in the life of the Author (unnamed), a literary celebrity in his forties, who is in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night to give a reading. Bored, he looks for distraction - and finds copy. On the way he stops at a cafe where he ‘bumps into’ some of his own characters. In his head he conjures up the life stories of the people he meets, not least Ricky, an equally bored but seductive waitress. Later, even as the reading from his new book is underway, and the obligatory inane questions ('Why do you write? Do you write with a pen or on a computer?) have come and gone — he weaves stories round the audience and the panel.

Afterwards, the Author invites the professional reader for a drink before walking her home. It turns out she lives just opposite, so she goes home and he wanders off into the night. But he returns, climbs the many flights of stairs to the flat, where she lives alone with her cat - and they have a brief but steamy sexual skirmish. Or is this merely a middle-aged writer’s fantasy? We never quite know where reality ends and invention begins. He spends the rest of the night wandering, smoking, inventing, regretting and thinking till dawn. The Rhyming of the title refers to the popular couplets of a Hebrew poet, once a household name but now virtually forgotten, whose little rhymes about life punctuate the story. At dawn, the Author reads in yesterday’s paper that the poet has just died, almost unnoticed.

This is a gem of a work by a master, about writing, reading, growing old and the elusive chimera of literary posterity.

The Same Sea

Amos Oz

Translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange

Vintage ISBN 9780701169244

February 2001

Here is a book in a magical category of one, a truly outstanding, resonant and original work, in a bold and daring new form, which breaks the mould of storytelling. It tells an intimate, everyday story of grief, love, attachment and loss through the voices of a fabulous range of characters - in some ways it recalls Under Milk Wood. Nadia Danon is dead, of cancer. Her widower, Albert, an accountant (who bears an odd resemblance to Amos), is trying to put his life back together. Her son has gone off to lose or find himself in Tibet. The son's girlfriend, a filmmaker, is back in Israel, making friendly, daughterly overtures to Albert - his response is less platonic. Meanwhile she has another lover and a rather repellent film producer also lusts after her. There are other wonderful characters. Theirs are the voices and the stories. It is beautiful, funny, heartbreaking, sexy, poetic, full of echoes and allusions, and yet with an astonishing immediacy and contemporaneity., and pure joy to read.

Unto Death

Amos Oz

Translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange

Vintage ISBN 9780099818700

July 2005

Unto Death contains two beautiful short novels linked by death and destruction. Crusade is set in 1096 - a year of sinister omens. Count Guillaume of Touron sets out on a crusade to Jerusalem and on the way he serves his God by killing any Jews he meets. But will the Count find the peace of mind he seeks when he faces the terrible realities of war in the Holy Land?

In Late Love Oz portrays an elderly professor living alone in Tel Aviv, a man neither loving nor loved. His last mission is to expose the plight of his fellow Russian Jews and alert the people of Israel to the conspiracy that threatens them. But nobody wants to listen.

Foreign Bodies

Cynthia Ozick

Atlantic Books ISBN 9781848877351

June 2011

The collapse of her brief marriage has stalled Bea Nightingale's life, leaving her middle-aged and alone, teaching in an impoverished borough of 1950s New York. A plea from her estranged brother gives Bea the excuse to escape lassitude by leaving for Paris to retrieve a nephew she barely knows; but the siren call of Europe threatens to deafen Bea to the dangers of entangling herself in the lives of her brother's family. Travelling from America to France, Bea leaves the stigma of divorce on the far side of the Atlantic; newly liberated, she chooses to defend her nephew and his girlfriend Lili by waging a war of letters on the brother she has promised to help. But Bea's generosity is a mixed blessing: those she tries to help seem to be harmed, and as Bea's family unravel from around her, she finds herself once again drawn to the husband she thought she had left in the past...By one of America's great living writers, Foreign Bodies is a truly virtuosic novel. The story of Bea's travails on the continent is a fierce and heartbreaking insight into the curious nature of love: how it can be commanded and abused; earned and cherished; or even lost altogether.

The Shawl

Vintage International ISBN 9780679729266

The Shawl is comprised of two stories, The Shawl and Rosa. The first and much shorter of the stories is an extremely powerful account of the brutality of the Nazi concentration camps. Rosa, (who we meet again 30 years later in the second story), has been hiding and protecting her daughter Magda in a shawl. Rosa's 14 year old niece, Stella, (who also is central to the second story) takes the shawl from the child for her own comfort. The horrific events that follow shape the remainder of Rosa's life--and this book.

In the sequel, Rosa, now 59 years old, has moved to Miami after literally destroying the junk shop in New York which she had owned. She lives an isolated life in a dilapidated one room apartment. Stella, who remained in New York, supports her financially, and is her primary source of contact with the outside world. A serendipitous meeting at a laundromat with a Mr. Persky, however, changes Rosa's life.

This is not to imply that there is a romanticized ending to this story--just a glimmer of hope of reconnection to the world is offered. For Rosa was still living the holocaust. As she put it--there's life before, life during (Hitler's reign) and life after--"Before is a dream. After is a joke. Only during stays." This orientation to the world is what Persky challenges.

Gods Behaving Badly

Marie Phillips

Vintage ISBN 9780099513025
August 2007

Being immortal isn't all it's cracked up to be. Life's hard for a Greek god in the 21st century: nobody believes in you any more, even your own family doesn't respect you, and you're stuck in a delapidated hovel in north London with too many siblings and not enough hot water. But for Artemis (goddess of hunting, professional dog walker), Aphrodite (goddess of beauty, telephone sex operator) and Apollo (god of the sun, TV psychic) there's no way out... Until a meek cleaner and her would-be boyfriend come into their lives, and turn the world literally upside down.

Gods Behaving Badly is that rare thing, a charming, funny, utterly original first novel that satisfies the head and the heart.

Far to Go

Alison Pick

Headline ISBN 9780755379415

May 2011

Far to Go is a powerful and profoundly moving story about one family's epic journey to flee the Nazi occupation of their homeland in 1939, and above all to save the life of a six-year-old boy.
Pavel and Anneliese Bauer are affluent, secular Jews, whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of the German forces in Czechoslovakia. Desperate to avoid deportation, the Bauers flee to Prague with their six-year-old son, Pepik, and his beloved nanny, Marta. When the family try to flee without her to Paris, Marta betrays them to her Nazi boyfriend. But it is through Marta's determination that Pepik secures a place on a Kindertransport, though he never sees his parents or Marta again.
Inspired by Alison Pick's own grandparents who fled their native Czechoslovakia for Canada during the Second World War, Far to Go is a deeply personal and emotionally harrowing novel.

The Worst Intentions

Alessandro Piperno

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Europa Editions ISBN 9781933372334
July 2007

Daniel is the thirty-three-year-old heir to the dappled fortunes of the Sonninos, a wealthy Jewish-Italian family whose staggering rise and fall during the years spanning the end of WW2 and the beginning of the twenty-first century provides the richly colored backdrop to this remarkable tragi-comedy. Daniel has inherited his grandfather’s extravagant passions and his father’s servility, as well as the excesses of his social class. He is also victim of a crippling infatuation with Gaia, fountainhead of his erotic fantasies and fetishes. This novel will be justly compared to the works of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. An audacious, sumptuous novel about ritual and liberty, love and war, sex and betrayal, set in the opulent neighborhoods of contemporary Rome.

Alessandro Piperno was born in Rome in 1972. He is a professor of French literature at Rome’s Tor Vergata University. In 2000, he published his non-fiction book, Proust Anti-Jew, dividing his readers into staunch supporters and fierce detractors. His debut novel, The Worst Intentions, was an instant bestseller and won the Campiello Prize for first novels.

The Chosen

Chaim Potok

Penguin Classic ISBN 9780141040776

November 2009

Following a baseball game that nearly became a religious war, two Jewish boys become friends. Danny comes from the strict Hasidic sect that keeps him bound in centuries of orthodoxy. Reuven is brought up by a father patently aware of the twentieth century. Everything tries to destroy their friendship, but they use honesty with each other as a shield and it proves an impenetrable protection.

My Name is Asher Lev

Penguin Classic ISBN 9780141190563

November 2009

Asher Lev is a gifted loner, the artist who painted the sensational Brooklyn Crucifixion. Into it he poured all the anguish and torment a Jew can feel when torn between the faith of his fathers and the calling of his art. Here Asher Lev plunges back into his childhood and recounts the story of love and conflict which dragged him to this crossroads.