Fiction - S

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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From the Four Winds

Haim Sabato

Translated by Yaacob Dweck

Toby Press ISBN 9781592642403

Haim Sabato offers another rich historical novel in From the Four Winds, an evocative rendering of his childhood experiences in an immigrant transit camp in 1950s Israel.
The young Haim is disturbed by the suppressed memories of the adults living in the immigrant community, until Farkash, a mysterious, unforgettable character takes Haim under his wing and reveals a sorrowful story that will affect Haim for the rest of his life.

Adjusting Sights

Translated by Hillel Halkin.

Toby Press ISBN 9781902881702

Winner of the Sapir Prize, Israel

When war breaks out in 1973, childhood friends Haim and Dov are

called up together to serve in their tank battalion, but in the chaos of battle the friends are separated. A month later, Haim returns alone, on his first leave home. As he struggles to come to terms with his experiences, weary and saddened but sustained by his religious faith, there is one question that remains uppermost in Haim's mind: What happened to Dov during those fateful days after the outbreak of war?

Reminiscent of S.Y. Agnon, Sabato's compelling, poignant account tells the story of a young man who has to adjust not only the sights of his tank, but his understanding of the world he lives in.

HAIM SABATO descends from a long line of rabbis from Aleppo, Syria. His family had lived in Egypt for two generations, before moving to Israel when he was six. He served in the tank corps in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

The J-Word

Andrew Sanger

Snowbooks ISBN 9781905005956 

January 2009

'Did I say I was Jewish? I should be Jewish all of a sudden?' Argumentative, Yiddish-speaking, 80-year-old Jack Silver has reluctantly returned to Golders Green to care for his 10-year-old grandson, Danny. Unpredictable and outspoken but warm-hearted, Jack is resolutely secular and repudiates everything Jewish. His profoundly troubled son, now a successful middle-aged journalist, has followed in his footsteps, while the brilliant young Danny has been kept in ignorance of his heritage.

When Jack is beaten up by an antisemitic gang, it changes everything. He and Danny secretly set out to outwit and track down the thugs and bring them to justice. The hunt takes Jack into memories of his own childhood and the two unlikely heroes discover a shared identity spanning generations that eventually draws the whole family together.

The Delegates' Choice

Ian Sansom

HarperPerennial ISBN 9780007255344  

January 2008

Israel Armstrong returns for more crime solving adventure in this hilarious third novel from the Mobile Library series.

Israel has been invited to attend the Mobile Meet in London, the annual mobile library convention, with his irascible companion Ted Carson. Back in the UK, Israel is reunited with his family, and there is much eating of paprika chicken, baklava and the drinking of good coffee. But within only twenty-four hours of their arrival, the mobile library has been nicked. Who on earth would want to steal a thirty-year old rust-bucket of a van, and who can the two men turn to for assistance? Can Mr and Mrs Krimholz, the parents of Israel's childhood rival Adam Krimholz, help them out? Amidst all this mayhem, will Israel and Ted, one of literature's oddest oddball couples, ever make it to the Mobile Meet?

In this, his most puzzling, personal and problematic case yet, Israel has never had it so bad! neither has his library.

Mr Dixon Disappears

HarperPerennial ISBN 9780007207008

August 2006

Dixon and Pickering's, County Antrim's legendary department store, is preparing to celebrate its centenary. But the elderly Mr Dixon - a member of the Ulster Association of Magicians - has gone missing, along with one hundred thousand pounds in cash. It smells, pretty badly, of a kidnap. Israel becomes a suspect in the police investigation and is suspended from his job by his boss, the ever-fearsome Linda Wei. He's having to fight to clear his name. Does Israel's acclaimed five-panel touring exhibition showing the history of Dixon and Pickering's in old photographs and artefacts perhaps hold the key to Mr Dixon's mysterious disappearance? Will romance blossom between Israel and Rosie Hart, the barmaid at the First and Last? Will Linda Wei stick to her diet? And has nobody here heard of Franz Kafka?

The Case of the Missing Books

HarperPerennial ISBN 9780007206995  
February 2006

This title introduces Israel Armstrong, one of literature's most unlikely detectives in the first of a series of novels from the author of the critically acclaimed "Ring Road". Israel is an intelligent, shy, passionate, sensitive sort of soul: he's Jewish; he's a vegetarian; he could maybe do with losing a little weight. And he's just arrived in Ireland to take up his first post as a librarian. But the library's been shut down and Israel ends up stranded on the North Antrim coast driving an old mobile library. There's nice scenery, but 15,000 fewer books than there should be. Who on earth steals that many books? How? When would they have time to read them all? And is there anywhere in this godforsaken place where he can get a proper cappuccino and a decent newspaper? Israel wants answers...

Random Acts of Heroic Love

Danny Scheinmann

Transworld ISBN 9780552774222 
January 2008

Can love outwit death?

1992: Leo Deakin wakes up in a hospital somewhere in South America. His girlfriend Eleni is dead and Leo doesn't know where he is or how she died. He blames himself for the tragedy and is sucked into a spiral of despair. But Leo is about to discover something that will change his life for ever.

1917: Moritz Daniecki is a fugitive from a Siberian POW camp. Seven thousand kilometres over the Russian steppes separate him from his village and his sweetheart, whose memory has kept him alive through carnage and captivity. The Great War may be over, but Moritz now faces a perilous journey across a continent riven by civil war. When Moritz finally limps back into his village to claim the hand of the woman he left behind, will she still be waiting?

Danny Scheinmann paints a dramatic portrait of two men sustaining their lives through the memory of love. Cinematic and brimming with raw emotions, it is the magnificent and emotive debut of a remarkable new writer.

Danny Scheinmann is a writer, actor and storyteller. He has performed at the Royal National Theatre and in over 35 countries. His tours include storytelling in Siberia and a year and a half working for an avant-garde theatre group creating shows with street children in Colombia, the Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam. He also co-wrote and acted in the acclaimed independent film The West Wittering Affair. He was born in Manchester and lives in London with his wife and three children. This is his first book.

Tree of Souls

The Mythology of Judaism

Howard Schwartz

Oxford University Press ISBN 9780195327137
August 2007

Only one of the world's mythologies has remained essentially unrecognized--the mythology of Judaism. As Howard Schwartz reveals in Tree of Souls , the first anthology of Jewish mythology in English, this mythical tradition is as rich and as fascinating as any in the world.
Drawing from the Bible, the Pseudepigrapha, the Talmud and Midrash, the kabbalistic literature, medieval folklore, Hasidic texts, and oral lore collected in the modern era, Schwartz has gathered together nearly 700 of the key Jewish myths. The myths themselves are marvelous. We read of Adam's diamond and the Land of Eretz (where it is always dark), the fall of Lucifer and the quarrel of the sun and the moon, the Treasury of Souls and the Divine Chariot. We discover new tales about the great figures of the Hebrew Bible, from Adam to Moses; stories about God's Bride, the Shekhinah , and the evil temptress, Lilith; plus many tales about angels and demons, spirits and vampires, giant beasts and the Golem. Equally important, Schwartz provides a wealth of additional information.

For each myth, he includes extensive commentary, revealing the source of the myth and explaining how it relates to other Jewish myths as well as to world literature (for instance, comparing Eve's release of evil into the world with Pandora's). For ease of use, Schwartz divides the volume into ten books: Myths of God, Myths of Creation, Myths of Heaven, Myths of Hell, Myths of the Holy Word, Myths of the Holy Time, Myths of the Holy People, Myths of the Holy Land, Myths of Exile, and Myths of the Messiah.

Schwartz, a renowned collector and teller of traditional Jewish tales, now illuminates the previously unexplored territory of Jewish mythology. This pioneering anthology is essential for anyone interested in the Hebrew Bible, Jewish faith and culture, and world mythology.

Collected Stories

Moacyr Scliar

Translated by Translated by Eloah F. Giacomelli,

with an introduction by Ilan Stavans

University of New Mexico Press ISBN 9780826319111

September 1999

From Brazil's most distinguished and important Jewish writer comes this anthology comprised of six collections: in The Carnival of the Animals, Scliar uses political allegory to convey what was normally censored during the height of repression under Brazil?s military regime. These tragicomic stories reveal Scliar?s interest in issues of oppression, persecution, holocaust, mutability, and the interplay between good and evil. The Ballad of the False Messiah develops the theme of postponement in the sense that for Jews redemption is always postponed in a vain wait for the Messiah. In The Tremulous Earth Scliar explores cruelty and violence in the tenuous lives of his characters, but his experience as a medical doctor informs his compassion for human frailty. Scliar expands his use of fantasy and magical realism in The Dwarf in the Television Set in topics that range from Jewish prophets to marital revenge. The Enigmatic Eye has been described as a masterpiece evoking the enigmas of art and life, and in Van Gogh's Ear, Scliar uses dark and subtle humor in a collection of biblical parables. Here witchcraft, magic, conundrums, and labyrinths are shown to be part of everyday life. A final autobiographical piece ties the collections together in which Scliar discusses his membership in Jewish, medical, gaucho, and Brazilian "tribes."

These powerful stories, individually humorous, bleak, or haunting, together bring a compelling voice of the Jewish Diaspora to the wide readership it deserves.

And the Rat Laughed

Nava Semel

Translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger

Hybrid Publishers ISBN: 9781876462659

And the Rat Laughed is a unique book. Unlike other Holocaust-related books that focus on the historical horrific events, this novel deals with the act of remembering them. It resembles a relay race in which the characters transfer memory from one another, while traveling on the axis of time .

The book begins in the last day of 1999, when a survivor grandmother in Tel Aviv shares her tragic life story as a hidden child in a pit, with only a rat for company with her granddaughter. The day after – 2000 already – the granddaughter tells the legend of “Girl and Rat” to her teacher and in 2009 those who heard it through her classmates establish an internet website with poems. From now on this memory is spread all over the world and becomes a myth. In 2099 the future anthropologist Y-Mee Prana discovers it and tries to uncover its mysterious roots. In her research, she reveals the first man who created this myth in the past. Father Stanislaw, a Catholic priest, saved that little Jewish girl (who later became the grandmother in Tel Aviv) and returned her after the war to her Jewish people. In his personal journal he documented everything, to make sure the world would never forget. The chain of "Remembearers", therefore, moves from the present to the future and back to the past .

The novel is written in five genres: story, legend, poems, science fiction and diary, creating a cycle of 150 years. And the Rat Laughed got acclaim for its use of unconventional and original literary devices and became a ground breaker for exploring the act of memory itself. How do we tell our painful story? Does it change while we recall it? How will our next recipient recall it in their own individual way? Is Art the only way to transfer emotional memory ?

The novel was enthusiastically received by both the Israeli public and the critics .

It was adapted for the stage and became a very successful opera, composed by Ella Milch-Sheriff and performed by the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv and the Israeli Chamber Orchestra for the last four years, representing Israel at the Theatre Festivals in Warsaw in Poland, Sibiu in Romania and Bucharest National Theatre .

A Pigeon and a Boy

Meir Shalev

Shocken Books ISBN 9780805212143

January 2009

From the internationally acclaimed Israeli writer Meir Shalev comes a mesmerizing novel of two love stories, separated by half a century but connected by one enchanting act of devotion.

During the 1948 War of Independence--a time when pigeons are still used to deliver battlefield messages--a gifted young pigeon handler is mortally wounded. In the moments before his death, he dispatches one last pigeon. The bird is carrying his extraordinary gift to the girl he has loved since adolescence. Intertwined with this story is the contemporary tale of Yair Mendelsohn, who has his own legacy from the 1948 war. Yair is a tour guide specializing in bird-watching trips who, in middle age, falls in love again with a childhood girlfriend. His growing passion for her, along with a gift from his mother on her deathbed, becomes the key to a life he thought no longer possible. 

Unforgettable in both its particulars and its sweep, A Pigeon and A Boy is a tale of lovers then and now--of how deeply we love, of what home is, and why we, like pigeons trained to fly in one direction only, must eventually return to it.  In a voice that is at once playful, wise, and altogether beguiling, Meir Shalev tells a story as universal as war and as intimate as a winged declaration of love.

Absurdistan

Gary Shteyngart

Granta ISBN 978184708 0066
June 2007

Meet Misha Vainberg, aka Snack Daddy, a 325-pound disaster of a human being, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia and proud holder of a degree in multicultural studies from Accidental College, USA. Misha is an American impounded in a Russian's body and the only place he feels at home is New York; he just wants to live in the South Bronx with his Latina girlfriend, but after his gangster father murders an Oklahoma businessman in Russia, all hopes of a U.S. visa are lost.

Salvation lies in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan (a fictional former Soviet republic), where a crooked consular officer will sell Misha a Belgian passport. But after a civil war breaks out between two competing ethnic groups and a local warlord installs hapless Misha as minister of multicultural affairs, our hero soon finds himself covered in oil, fighting for his life, falling in love, and trying to figure out if a normal life is still possible in the twenty-first century.

Early Bright

Ami Silber

Toby Press ISBN 9781592642410

October 2008

From the black jazz clubs on Central Avenue in Watts, to the tidy homes of the war widows he cons, Louis Greenberg lives life on the outside. No matter how charming and passionate he is, an outsider he will always be. He is white, a Jew, and that never goes away.

It is 1948. An impulsive, irrevocable decision has led to Louis' permanent exile from his family back in New York. Six years later,

his father's disappointment still haunts him. Living a fractured, confusing life in Los Angeles, Louis moves between worlds. By day he is a c-man, artfully conning the relatives of men killed in action in World War II out of their cash, preying upon their memories and pain. By night he enters the only world where he is truly alive. In the all-black underground clubs of L.A. he nurtures his passion for bebop, listening to and playing cutting-edge jazz. Here he is still an outsider, but he has won acceptance-to a point. Here, he meets the woman he loves, but can never truly have, in the segregated world of the forties.

As Louis navigates the treacherous waters of jazz and women, passion and cynicism, he will try for one big con to put his troubled life to rights-but the many dissonant threads of past and present will come together, ensnaring him in a web of his own making. Ami Silber's poignant and memorable debut novel has an unforgettable protagonist; Louis will pull you into his world and his voice will stay with you long after his story ends.

Ami Silber is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she received her MFA. She also received an MA in Literature from UC San Diego. She won the Short Story Award for New Writers from Glimmer Train Press and her work has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories.

The Credit Draper

J. David Simons

Two Ravens Press ISBN 9781906120252

May 2008

In 1911, eleven-year-old Avram Escovitz is shipped off to Scotland by his mother to escape conscription into the Russian Army. Growing up in the heart of the Kahn family in the tightly-knit Jewish community in the Glasgow Gorbals, Avram discovers he has a natural talent for playing football. He dreams of turning out for Celtic – but war intervenes. He is sent to work with his adopted uncle, the orthodox Jew Mendel Cohen, as a credit draper, peddling goods on credit to the crofters and villagers of the Western Highlands. There, a chance encounter with a Royal Flying Corps pilot leads to fresh possibilities: setting up a new business venture and winning the heart of a crofter girl. But shaking off his Jewish roots is not so simple ...

The Credit Draper, a beautiful and original début novel by J. David Simons, is more than just an immigrant’s story about the search for identity in an alien land: it is also a book about whisky, football and waterproof clothing.

J. David Simons was born in Glasgow in 1953. He studied law at Glasgow University and became a partner at an Edinburgh law firm before giving up his practice in 1978 to live on a kibbutz in Israel. Since then he has lived in Australia, Japan and England, working at various stages along the way as a charity administrator, cotton farmer, language teacher and university lecturer. In his most recent guise as a journalist he has written extensively about the Internet and new media. He returned to Glasgow in 2006; The Credit Draper is his first novel.

True Tales of the Wild West

Clive Sinclair

Pan Macmillan ISBN 9780330426435 
July 2008

Today’s Wild West is not what it was, though it wishes that it were. The old certainties are gone, leaving only questions -- but can anyone separate truth from legend, fact from fiction?

Two cousins set out to attempt just that: the one is Peppercorn, a fading photo-journalist in search of his inner cowboy; the other is Saltzman, lecturer in American Studies at the University of St Albans.

On their travels they encounter many of the great heroes of the Wild West – or at least the men and women who impersonate them – as well as other larger-than-life characters such as innocent Mercy Sweetbriar, runner-up in the ‘Appearance, Personality, and Photogenics’ category of South Dakota’s Miss Rodeo contest, not-so-innocent Miami Bitch, Kevin Costner, and Bill Janklow, Governor of South Dakota, and latter-day Indian fighter.

In order to fully capture the extravagance of these people and the landscapes they inhabit, Clive Sinclair has been driven to invent a new genre. He calls it Dodgy Realism, a melange of fact, fantasy, and fiction. Call it what you will, his new book is both an erudite investigation of, and a glorious romp through, the heartland of America.

Clive Sinclair was born in 1948 and is the author of several novels and short stories, as well as a collection of essays on 'the facts of life and the facts of death'. Included in Granta's original list of Best Young British Novelists, he has also received a Somerset Maugham Award, the Jewish Quarterly Prize and the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Fiction. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in St Albans.

The Einstein Girl

Philip Sington

Harvill Secker ISBN 9781846552908

August 2009

Thirty years after his death, private correspondence between Albert Einstein and his first wife, the Serbian mathematician Mileva Maric, was opened to public scrutiny for the first time. It revealed glimpses of a tragedy at the heart of their troubled marriage: a secret they went to extraordinary lengths to keep hidden from the world, and which, in spite of their divorce, they carried to the grave.

Two months before Adolf Hitler's rise to power, a beautiful young woman is found half naked and near death in the woods outside Berlin. When she finally emerges from a coma, she can remember nothing, not even her own name. The only clue to her identity is a handbill found nearby, advertising a public lecture by Albert Einstein: 'On the Present State of Quantum Theory'. Psychiatrist Martin Kirsch little knows that this will be his last case. Searching for the truth about his celebrated patient, he finds professional fascination turning to love. His investigations lead him to a remote corner of Serbia via a psychiatric hospital in Zurich, where the inheritor of Einstein's genius - his youngest son, Eduard - is writing a book that will destroy his illustrious father and, in the process, change the world. Intricately researched and relentlessly compelling, The Einstein Girl is a mystery about love and the lust for knowledge; a dark journey into the psychological hinterland of the twentieth century's greatest mind, culminating in an astonishing quantum twist.

The Autograph Man

Zadie Smith

Penguin ISBN 9780140276343

May 2003

Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. A small blip in a huge worldwide network of desire, it is his business to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them, occasionally fake them, and all to give the people what they want: a little piece of Fame. But what does Alex want? Only the return of his father, the re-instatement of some kind of all-powerful benevolent God-type-figure, the end of religion, something for his headache, three different girls, infinite grace, and the rare autograph of Forties movie actress Kitty Alexander. With fries.

The Autograph Man is a deeply funny, existential tour around the hollow things of modernity—celebrity, cinema and the ugly triumph of symbol over experience. Through London and then New York, Alex searches for the only autograph that ever mattered to him, resisting the mystical lure of Kabbalah and Zen, and avoiding all collectors, con-men, interfering Rabbis and Bonsai dealers who would put themselves in his path. Pushing against the tide of his generation, Alex-Li is on his way to finding enlightenment, otherwise known as some part of himself that cannot be signed, celebrated or sold...

Whatever Makes You Happy

William Sutcliffe

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747593645

May 2008

In William Sutcliffe's new novel, the hapless gap-yearers of Are You Experienced? have given way to three men in their early thirties who are not (in the eyes of their alienated mothers) properly settled.

Matt works for lads mag BALLS! and is a serial dater of girls half his age. Paul is an experienced hand at lying and evasion to keep his life choices a secret from his mother. Daniel spends his Saturday nights alone in his flat reading novels, pining for ex-girlfriend and love of his life Erin.

The mothers decide to launch a co-ordinated attack: they will arrive, without warning, to stay with their sons for one week with the intention of man-handling them back onto the right path.

Wonderfully funny, with some characteristically hilarious set pieces, William has once again shone a brilliantly incisive spotlight on his generation.

William Sutcliffe is the author of four previous novels, New Boy, Are You Experienced?, The Love Hexagon and Bad Influence, which have been translated into twenty languages.