Fiction - W

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 Seventh Well

Fred Wander

Translated and with an afterword by Michael Hoffman

Granta Books ISBN 9781847080226
February 2008

Winner of the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Prize 2009

The Seventh Well is a short autobiographical novel, whose loose, episodic chapters cover the period of 1942-5, which the author spent in German concentration camps. Flashbacks recall his early internment in France, and the book closes with the liberation of Buchenwald in April 1945. Rather than focus on his own story though, Fred Wander describes the lives and deaths of his fellow internees; the creative power of his story-telling invests their deaths with dignity, and keeps their memories alive.

It was first published in 1971, then reissued with a new afterword to great acclaim in Germany in 2005, the year before the author died aged ninety. This new translation by acclaimed translator and poet Michael Hofmann captures the power and physicality of his language.

Fred Wander was born in 1917 in Vienna. In 1938 he emigrated to France where he was interned in 1939, escaped to Switzerland, from where he was deported to Germany in 1942. He survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald and several other concentration camps. He was moved to write The Seventh Well after the tragic death of his daughter Kitty. Fred died in 2006 aged ninety.

Escape from Hell : The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol
Alfred Wetzler
Translated by Ewald Osers ·Foreword by Sir Martin Gilbert
Editor Dr. Peter Varnai · Introduction by Dr. Robert Rozett

Berghahn Books ISBN 9781845451837 

“Alfred Wetzler was a true hero. His escape from Auschwitz, and the report he helped compile, telling for the first time the truth about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving the lives of 120,000 Jews: the Jews of Budapest who were about to be deported to their deaths. No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler and the SS had determined for them. This book tells Wetzler's story”. · Sir Martin Gilbert

Together with another young Slovak Jew, both of them deported in 1942, the author succeeded in escaping from the notorious death camp in the spring of 1944. There
were some very few successful escapes from Auschwitz during the war, but it was these two who smuggled out the damning evidence – a ground plan of the camp, constructional
details of the gas chambers and crematoriums and, most convincingly, a label from a canister of Cyclone gas. The present book is cast in the form of a novel to allow factual information not personally collected by the two fugitives, but provided for them by a handful
of reliable friends, to be included. Nothing, however, has been invented. It is a shocking account of Nazi genocide and of the inhuman conditions in the camp, but equally
shocking is the initial disbelief the fugitive’s revelations met with after their return.

Ewald Osers has translated over 150 books and received many translation prizes and honours.

The Hiding Room

Jonathan Wilson

Five Leaves Publishing  ISBN 9781905512300

The Hiding Room moves between Cairo and British Mandate Palestine in 1941, and Israel of 1991. In 1941 a reserved English officer falls for a waiflike Viennese Jew trying to flee to Palestine. He betrays her, then tries to save her from the consequences of his action. He too has to flee, at risk both from his fellow British soldiers and the Zionist underground. 50 years on, at the height of the Intifada, the son of this brief partnership comes to Israel and Palestine to trace what happened to his father.

The Hiding Room is a tense historical thriller.

An Ambulance is on the Way

Five Leaves Publishing  ISBN 9781905512355

Sharp, bittersweet tales of middle-aged American men, in hot water with their women, with their sweet or streetwise kids, with their own consciences.
This is about the American husband and father: well meaning but caught out, horny but going to seed, adrift on dreams and fancies and looking for a break. Men in trouble.

A Palestine Affair
Five Leaves Publishing  ISBN 9781905512195 

In British-occupied Palestine after World War 1, a beleaguered London painter and his American wife witness the murder of an Orthodox Jew. She is drawn into an affair with the British investigating officer, while he seeks solace in painting. Each had come to Palestine to escape grief, and had to confront the political and person issues they had left behind.

Jonathan Wilson was born in London but has lived in the USA since 1976. His previous two books, Schoom and The Hiding Room were published by Secker and Penguin. He is also the author of the biography Marc Chagall and two critical studies of the fiction of Saul Bellow
Jonathan Wilson writes regularly for the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review. He has a Guggenheim Fellowship.He is a professor of English at Tufts University and lives with his family in Newton, Massachusetts.

Leonard Woolf

Preface by Lyndall Gordon
Persephone Books ISBN 9781903155339

The Wise Virgins (1913) is a semi-autobiographical novel about a dilemma: whether Harry, the hero, should go into the family business and marry the suitable but dull girl next door or move in artistic circles and marry one of the entrancing 'Lawrence' girls. For, as Lyndall Gordon writes: 'It is a truth widely acknowledged that Camilla Lawrence is a portrait of the author's wife - Virginia Woolf.' This is one reason why the novel is so intriguing. But it is also a Forsterian social comedy, funny, perceptive, highly intelligent, full of clever dialogue and at times bitterly satirical; while the dramatic and emotional dénouement still retains a great deal of its power to shock.

It was on his honeymoon in 1912 that Leonard Woolf began writing his second (and final) novel. He was 31, newly returned from seven years as a colonial administrator, and asking himself much the same questions as his hero. Helen Dunmore wrote in The Sunday Times: 'It's a passionate, cuttingly truthful story of a love affair between two people struggling against the prejudices of their time and place. Woolf's writing is almost unbearably honest.'