Fiction - R
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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Rosa
Jonathan Rabb
Halban Publishers ISBN 9781905559046
November 2007
 November 1918: socialist revolution is sweeping across Germany, transforming war-ravaged Berlin, sending Kaiser Wilhelm into exile, into a political battleground. Order returned only when the two leaders of the movement—Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg—were hunted down and assassinated on the fifteenth of January, 1919. Liebknecht’s body was discovered the next morning; Luxemburg’s body, however, remained missing until the end of May.
A genuine mystery at the time, Rosa’s fate has continued to prompt speculation to this day. Jonathan Rabb’s taut new political thriller imagines one strikingly real possibility. Five women from the slums are found murdered, all with identical markings on their back. When the sixth turns out to be the socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, the case turns political with the Polpo, the political police, complicating the investigations of Detective Inspector Nikolai Hoffner and his assistant Hans Fichte.
Jonathan Rabb is a political theorist and lives in New York City.
The Saturday Wife 
Naomi Ragen
St Martin's Griffin ISBN
9780312352394
October 2008
Ragen utilizes her fluid writing style -- rich with charm and detail -- to
break new ground as she harnesses satire to expose a world filled with contradiction. Beautiful, blonde, materialistic Delilah Levy steps into a life she could have never imagined when in a moment of panic she decides to marry a sincere Rabbinical student. But the reality of becoming a paragon of virtue for a demanding and hypocritical congregation leads sexy Delilah into a vortex of shocking choices which spiral out of control into a catastrophe which is as sadly believable as it is wildly amusing. Told with immense warmth, fascinating insight, and wicked humor, The Saturday Wife depicts the pitched and often losing battle of all of us as we struggle to hold on to our faith and our values amid the often delicious temptations of the modern world.
Chains Around the Grass
Toby Press ISBN
9781902881829
December 2003
 Sara is barely six years old when her beloved father unexpectedly vanishes from her life. Her mother, Ruth, a dreamy and reluctant housewife, is now left with three small children to bring up, and the knowledge that she will somehow have to pick up the pieces, if she is to survive and fend for the family. But Sara takes up a vigil at the window of their dismal apartment, refusing to accept that her father won't be coming back. To this bittersweet and moving tale of childhood and the loss of innocence, the author brings the added intensity of a personal memoir. This is Naomi Ragen at her best, her writing charged with a searing, emotional truth as she unravels a tale of childhood, betrayal and the unending resilience of family love.
NAOMI RAGEN is the author of four international best-sellers: Jephte’s Daughter, Sotah, The Sacrifice of Tamar, and The Ghost of Hannah Mendes. Born in New York, she attended Brooklyn College and received an MA in English from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For the last thirty years, she has made her home in Jerusalem. The translation of her books into Hebrew in 1995 has made her one of Israel’s best-loved authors. An outspoken advocate for gender equality and human rights, she is a columnist for The Jerusalem Post. Ragen's first play, Women’s Quorum, was commissioned by Habima, Israel’s National Theater.
Final Demands
Frederic Raphael
JR Books Ltd ISBN
9781906779849
March 2010
 Now, in the culminating volume in the trilogy, writer Adam Morris and his high-flying Cambridge contemporaries find themselves at the peak of influence and success as New Labour and the Blair boom years take them high on the slippery pole of success. At the same time, they begin to fear the moment when seniority will render them superfluous. Adam, as astringent as ever, continues to stand centre stage, but his other contemporaries too play their vivid and energetic parts. Alan Parks still commands the nation's screens and microphones; movie director Mike Clode continues to pursue the bitch goddess Success; Joyce Hadleigh realises an unlikely ambition when she becomes joined at the hype with Samuel Marcus Cohen, English literature's Nobel laureate-in-waiting. The younger generation too is growing into unpredictable potency. When he accepts a teaching gig In Los Angeles, Adam finds himself confronting his beautiful daughter Rachel's complex emotional life. And then, back in London, on Boxing Day, he learns that his son Tom's wife, Juliana granddaughter of a Nazi business man has come to a startling decision. When he and Juliana call to deliver a belated Christmas present to the film producer Bruno Laszlo, comedy and tragedy collide in a cruelly comic climax.
Fame and Fortune
JR Books Ltd ISBN
9781906217570
June 2008
Fame and Fortune is the long-awaited continuation
of Frederic Raphael's best-selling novel The Glittering Prizes, which followed a generation of Cambridge graduates into the academic and media world of the 1960s. In this new book, Adam Morris, successful novelist and screenwriter, now in his late forties, remains the central character, but many of his contemporaries continue to feature in his life.
These include the ambitious and endlessly scheming movie director Mike Clode, the Australian-born TV star Alan Parks, who now seems to front every other serious or semi-serious programme on the box, and Joyce Hadleigh, whose career on TV Alan has fostered, just as years earlier, at Cambridge, he fathered her child whom Dan Bradley, now a primary school headmaster in Wandsworth, raised as his own. The vivid complexity of Fame and Fortune reflects the nature of London life in the era of Margaret Thatcher, but also the changing attitudes and life styles of a younger generation. Adam and his wife Barbara find themselves faced with the defection of their son, Tom, to a Christian sect which leads him to drop out of university and desert his family, a situation which is compounded, with disconcerting consequences, when their beautiful, high-achieving daughter Rachel meets Adam's college friend Bill Bourne, the son of a scouse docker, now a professor in California. And in varying ways, the other characters too discover the fragility of the success and happiness which they had enjoyed, violence and death playing their cruel sudden parts in their lives.
The Glittering Prizes
JR Books ISBN
9781906217334
Adam Morris, Alan Parks, Mike Clode, Anna Cunnginham, Barbara
Ransome and the others leave Cambridge University to discover
varying degrees of satisfaction, success and material comfort. But
over all of them lies the common memory of those heady, golden
days spent in unravelling the knots of friendship, in exploratory sex
and in Badinage, that none of them will ever quite forget.
A compelling story, The Glittering Prizes reflects the changing
attitudes and styles of a generaton that went to Cambridge in the
fifties.The subject of a highly acclaimed television series starring Tom Conti, The Glitter Prizes is a witty, incisive, beautifully written evocation of an era and its children.
The Fourth Assassin 
Matt Rees
Atlantic Books ISBN
9781848872035
February 2010
When Omar Yussef travels to New York for a UN conference, he is eager
to see his youngest son, Ala. But the discovery of a decapitated corpse in his son's empty apartment catapults him into a police enquiry full of contradictions. In his desperation to clear Ala's name, Omar's investigations place him at the heart of a deadly international conspiracy.
The Samaritan Secret
Atlantic Books ISBN
9781843546504
When Omar Yussef travels to Nablus, the West Bank’s most violent town, to attend a wedding, he little expects the trouble that awaits him. An ancient Torah scroll belonging to the Samaritans, descendants of the biblical Joseph, has been stolen. But when the dead body of a young Samaritan is discovered, a seemingly straightforward theft inquiry takes an unexpected turn.
As Omar sets out to find the perpetrators of this murder, he is driven down into the murky alleys and tunnels of the old casbah in Nablus. Here, as he uncovers a deepening political rift, the secret deals of one of the region’s richest businessmen, and the shadowy world of the tiny Samaritan community, he begins to wonder whether he will be able to attend the wedding after all…
The Saladin Murder
Matt Rees
Atlantic Books ISBN
9781843546481
July 2008
It is a blistering morning in Gaza, as Omar Yussef struggles along the uneven streets to carry out a school inspection. But when he learns
that a fellow teacher has been accused of connections with the CIA, and jailed, Yussef’s suspicions are immediately aroused.
The more Yussef investigates the arrest, the more people seem to be implicated, and the murkier his search for the truth becomes.
With the police force, the military and Gaza’s most powerful gang all
out to silence him, Yussef must face the terrifying realisation that he is no longer fighting to save his colleague – but himself.
Crime Writers Association Dagger winner.
The Bethlehem Murders
Matt Rees
Atlantic Books ISBN
9781843546030
February 2008
 The Bethlehem Murders is the riveting first novel in a new mystery series featuring Omar Yussef and set in the heart of the Middle East. The murder of a leader of the Palestinian Martyrs Brigade leads to the arrest of George Saba, a Palestinian Christian accused of collaborating with the Israelis. Omar Yussef, a modest history teacher at a United Nations school in the West Bank, is impelled to investigate the murder to exonerate his former pupil, whom he knows is innocent. As he struggles to save his friend, Omar Yussef is drawn into a tangled plot where it is impossible to tell friend from enemy.
Matt Beynon Rees has written a richly detailed, absorbing mystery that illuminates the Palestinian conflict and its political complexities from within.
Matt Beynon Rees has covered the Middle East as a journalist for a decade, with the vast majority of that time spent among Palestinians and Israelis. He is the former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time, where he is currently a contributor. Born in Wales, he is the author of Cain’s Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East.
The Spectacle Salesman's Family
Viola Roggenkamp
Virago ISBN:
9781844082216
October 2007
 Paul Schiefer is a travelling spectacles salesman. Every Monday morning he leaves Hamburg on a week-long sales trip. His wife, his mother-in-law and his two teenage daughters Fania and Vera see him off with abundant hugs and kisses, and they welcome him back with equal exuberance on Friday evening - just in time for Sabbath eve. While her husband is away, Alma Schiefer defends the wellbeing of her family with an explosive mixture of ferocious love and extreme determination. Thirteen-year-old Fania is torn between the comfort of home and the fearful thrills of the unknown outside world, a sixties world that contains student protest, beehive hairdos, Israel and the Six Day War, politics, religion, revolution and . . . the promise of love.
Sensual, funny and acerbic, The Spectacle Salesman’s Family is a brilliant, vivid portrait of Jewish life in post-Holocaust Germany that continues the Jewish tradition of memorialising, recounting the details in order to hold onto the past and its lessons.
Job
Joseph Roth
Granta Books ISBN
9781862073784
The tale of Mendel Singer, a God-fearing and ordinary Jew, living in Zuchnow in Russia. This modern Job goes through his trials in the ghettos of Tsarist Russia and on the unforgiving streets of New York. He loses his family, falls terribly ill and is badly abused. He needs a miracle.
 The Wandering Jewish
Granta ISBN
9781862074705
The first English translation of Joseph Roth's portrayal of the Jews of Eastern Europe: their poverty, their towns and trades, their feast days and the mysticism of their rabbis. Roth was conscious that this was a community living under the threat of extermination.
The Humbling
Philip Roth
Jonathan Cape ISBN
9780224087933
 Everything is over for Simon Axler. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent and his assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, 'are melted into air, into thin air'. When he goes on stage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His confidence in his powers has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him; he can no longer pretend to be someone else. 'Something fundamental has vanished.' His wife has gone, his audience has left him, his agent can't persuade him to make a comeback.
Into this shattering account of inexplicable and terrifying self-evacuation bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire, a consolation for the bereft life so risky and aberrant that it points not towards comfort and gratification but to a yet darker and more shocking end. In this long day’s journey into night, told with Roth’s inimitable urgency, bravura and gravity, all the ways that we persuade ourselves of our solidity, all our life’s performances – talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation – are stripped off.
Indignation
Vintage ISBN
9780099523420
It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious,
law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus
Messner is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighbourhood butcher, seems to have gone mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy.
As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father's fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the Midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world. This is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage and error, told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.
Exit Ghost
Vintage ISBN
9780099516088
 Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age. Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jaime, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman's youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman's first literary hero, E.I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation. The third connection is with Lonoff's would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff's "great secret".Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.
Everyman
Vintage ISBN
9780099501466
April 2007
Philip Roth’s twenty-seventh book takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century English allegorical play whose drama centres on the summoning of the living to death and whose hero, Everyman, is intended to be the personification of mankind. The fate of Roth’s Everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers and during his hospitalisation as a nine-year-old surgical patient through the crises of health that come close to killing him as a vigorous adult, and into his old age, when he is undone by the death and deterioration of his contemporaries and relentlessly stalked by his own menacing physical woes. A successful commercial advertising artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him, the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he’s made a mess of marriage.
Everyman is a painful human story of the regret and loss and stoicism of a man who becomes what he does not want to be. The terrain of this savagely sad short novel is the human body, and its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.
The Dying Animal
Vintage ISBN
9780099422693
October 2006
 David Kepesh is a white haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college, when he meets Consuela Castillo, a decorous, well-mannered student of twenty-four, the daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder and haunts him for the next eight years. Since the sexual revolution of the 1960's freed him from his wife and child, Kepesh has experimented with living what he calls an emancipated manhood beyond the reach of family or a mate. Over the years, he had refined that exuberant decade of protest and licence into an orderly way of life in which he is both unimpeded in the world of Eros and studiously devoted to his aesthetic pursuits. But the youth and beauty of this newly hatched woman a masterpiece as Kepesh describes Consuela, of 'volupte' - undo him completely. His worldliness, his confidence, his reason desert him, and on the brink of old age, a maddening sexual possessiveness transports him to the depths of deforming jealousy. The lighthearted erotic tale with which he began evolves into a poignant, tragic story of love and loss.
The Plot Against America
Vintage ISBN
9780099478560
When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Lindbergh had publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America towards a pointless war with Nazi Germany. Then, upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, he also negotiated a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler. What followed in America is the historical setting for this startling novel who recounts what it was like for his Newark family during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst.
 Portnoy's Complaint
Vintage ISBN
9780099399018
The famous confession of Alexander Portnoy who is thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood.
In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient".
The Interpretation of Murder
Jed Rubenfeld
Headline ISBN 9780755331420
January 2007
An inventive tour de force inspired by Sigmund Freud`s 1909 visit to America, accompanied by protégé and rival Carl Jung. When a wealthy young debutante is discovered bound, whipped and strangled in a luxurious apartment overlooking the city, and another society beauty narrowly escapes the same fate, the mayor of New York calls upon Freud to use his revolutionary new ideas to help the surviving victim recover her memory of the attack, and solve the crime. But nothing about the attacks - or about the surviving victim, Nora - is quite as it seems. And there are those in very high places determined to stop the truth coming out, and Freud`s startling theories taking root on American soil.
Jed Rubenfeld is currently the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale University. He wrote his undergraduate senior thesis on Freud.
Find out more on the book's website.
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