Fiction - X - Z

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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Friendly Fire

A. B. Yehoshua

Peter Halban Books  ISBN 9781905559084

November 2008

A long-married couple are spending an unaccustomed week apart. The wife has flown to East Africa to grieve the death of her sister with her brother-in-law, who had suffered worse heartbreak years earlier. The husband, a familiar Yehoshua character, stays behind in Israel for his busy lift engineering consultancy, and his large demanding family.

The chapters alternate between husband and wife, creating a complex web of family relations, memories and discoveries, with death looming large over all.

Friendly Fire explores themes touched upon in A.B. Yehoshua's earlier novels, with the author's customary stylistic brilliance, imagination and humour.

A Woman in Jerusalem

Peter Halban Books  ISBN: 9781870015981 

April 2006

A suicide bomb explodes in a Jerusalem market. One of the victims is a migrant worker without any papers, only a salary slip from the bakery where she worked as a night cleaner. As her body lies unclaimed in the morgue, her employers are labelled unfeeling and inhuman by a local journalist. The manager of human resources is given the task of discovering who she was and why she had come to Jerusalem.

As the image of this once-beautiful dead woman begins to obsess him, the manager turns this duty into a personal mission – he is no longer just saving his company’s reputation by trying to discover her identity and assure her of a dignified funeral. He is now restoring her not only to her family and country but also to common humanity – whilst at the same time conquering the hardness of his own heart.

Five Seasons

Peter Halban Books  ISBN 9781870015943 

July 2005

In the autumn, Molkho's wife dies. His years of loving care have ended and his newfound freedom proves unlike the one he had imagined. It is uneasy, filled with the erotic fantasies of a man who must fall in love, but whose longing for meaningful relationships is held hostage by the spirit of his wife. Winter sees him in Berlin in a comic encounter with a legal adviser from his office in Haifa. Spring takes him to the Galilee and an impossible infatuation. Jerusalem in the summer brings another man's wife and an extraordinary request. And the following autumn there is Nina whose yearning for her Russian home brings Molkho back to life.

A Late Divorce

Peter Halban Books ISBN 9781870015950 

November 2005

Yehuda Kaminka, a retired teacher, returns to Israel from the U.S. to divorce his estranged wife who is in a mental asylum, having tried to kill him a few years earlier. The impending divorce of their parents throws into turmoil the lives of the couple's three children and grandson, revealing the complexity of their relationships. Yehuda's nine days, leading up to Passover, are remembered by different members of the family: A.B. Yehoshua's brilliance reveals itself in these different voices, each a minor masterpiece. A picture slowly emerges of what happened as memories are revived, hopes expressed and dreams articulated. The narrative gathers pace as Yehuda's visit draws to an end and he changes his mind about the divorce agreement.

The Liberated Bride

Peter Halban Books ISBN 9781870015868 

November 2003

Professor Yohanan Rivlin has two obsessions, the first and most

ambitious, is to understand the Arab mind - no mean feat in itself

though perhaps made easier by the fact that he lives and works with

Israeli Arabs. The second - and more personal, though equally hard

to grasp - is to understand the failure of his elder son's marriage.

Rivlin's two quests lead him to extraordinary - and at times highly

entertaining - encounters with very disparate people, where the

personal becomes intertwined with the political, as he searches out the truth both in politics and life.

A.B. Yehoshua is one of Israel's pre-eminent novelists. He has been awarded the prestigious Israel Prize for his lifetime's creative contribution to Israel, the National Jewish Book Award in the US, the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize in the UK where he was also shortlisted in 2005 for the first Man Booker International Prize

Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes

Tamar Yellin

Toby Press ISBN 9781592642137

September 2008

Taking its imagery from the legend of the ten tribes of Israel exiled by the Assyrians and lost to the pages of history beyond the River Sambatyon, Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes follows the life-journey of a wandering narrator who encounters a series of displaced persons: the uncle whose endless travels seem romantic but are in fact a camouflage for a life of failure and malaise; the professor whose mastery of many languages can never assuage the anguish of his lost mother tongue; the girl student who may literally be invisible; the young man who spends his night hours obsessively writing and rewriting the slim volume he can never finish.

With each encounter the narrator inevitably moves on, dreaming of home, unable to resist the lure of the world's labyrinth…

Deeply melancholy with a streak of dark humour, Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes examines the heart of human longing, and asks the question: Where do we belong?

The Genizah at the House of Shepher

Toby Press ISBN 9780312379070 

Shulamit, a biblical scholar from England, returns to her grandparents’ home in Jerusalem for a visit, after an absence of many years. Almost immediately she becomes embroiled in a family feud over possession of the so-called Shepher Codex, a mysterious and valuable manuscript which has been discovered in the attic. In tracing the origins of the Codex she uncovers the history of the Shepher family itself: of her great-grandfather, who traveled to Babylon in search of the ten lost tribes; of her grandfather, a dreamer whose Zionist ideals brought him into conflict with his religion; of her parents, and their tormented love affair; and of her own orphaned and unhappy past. At the same time, she struggles to find answers to pressing questions: what is the significance of the Codex and where does it come from? Who is the stranger, Gideon, who is desperate to enlist her help? Above all, whom does the Codex belong to and what part must Shula play in its destiny?

Set against the backdrop of a changing Jerusalem over a hundred and thirty years, The Genizah at the House of Shepher is a large-canvas novel of exile and belonging, displacement, and the quest for both love and a true promised land.

Kafka in Bronteland and other stories

ISBN 9781592641536

Thirteen stories addressing universal themes of yearning and displacement, love, loss and the struggle to belong.
A latter-day Jewish Odysseus spends his life planning an intricate journey to the Promised Land, while an English father stranded in London mourns for his faraway Italian son. A man without a past searches the world for potential relatives, while in the title story, a Jew and a Muslim cast adrift in a Yorkshire landscape find momentary sisterhood over a copy of the Koran.
Blending irony with pathos, the mythical with the mundane, Kafka in Bronteland gives voice to a rich mix of characters living outside traditional patterns of identity in a world of complex migrations and tumultuous change.

Preliminaries

S. Yizhar

Toby Press ISBN 9781592641901 

May 2007

After a silence of almost 30 years since his Stories of a Plain, Yizhar reasserted his position as the greatest living master of Hebrew prose with Preliminaries. Strongly autobiographical, Preliminaries progresses frame by frame, showing a boy growing up in a Jewish farming community in Palestine and in the young city of Tel Aviv between the years 1917 and 1930. The boy’s sensual experience, his most primary, embryonic grasp of the world, coalesces with the adult consciousness looking back, a kind of late return to the innermost part of the child. His growing-up is linked to the story of the land of Israel in the early days of Jewish agricultural settlement: the longing to create a new Jew, the harsh existence of the struggling community, the early clashes between Jews and Arabs. Yizhar’s pictures are rich in sensual power, laden with scents and colors. But the real subject of Preliminaries is a child’s discovery, in confusion, wonder and terror, of the concrete world around him. In resurrecting his childhood in the land of Israel, Yizhar is carrying out a gentle stocktaking of the renewed Jewish society.

Preliminaries has been translated by Nicholas de Lange of Cambridge University, one of today’s outstanding translators from Hebrew to English. Introduced by Dan Miron.

Khirbet Khizeh

Translated by Nicholas De Lange and Yaacob Dweck

Ibis Editions ISBN 9789659012596
February 2008

This classic 1949 novella about the violent expulsion of Palestinian villagers by the Israeli army has long been considered a high point in Hebrew literature, and it has also given rise to fierce controversy over the years. Published just months after the end of the 1948 war (in which the author himself served as an intelligence officer) the book was an immediate sensation when it first appeared: the military censor tried to ban it, thousands of Israeli Jews rushed to read it, and a Palestinian journalist in Nablus described it as a sign that the Israeli army had a conscience and that peace was possible.

Since then, the book has continued to challenge and to disturb. (In 1978, the broadcast of a made-for-TV-movie of the novella was cancelled by the Likud government just hours before it was scheduled to air.) The various debates it has prompted would themselves make the book worth reading and pondering; but the novella is much more than a vital historical document—it is also a great work of art. Yizhar’s haunting, lyrical style and charged registration of the landscape are in many ways just as startling as his wrenchingly honest soldier’s-eye view of the war. Despite its international reputation, Khirbet Hiz’eh has never before been translated into English. Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck’s expert rendering captures with force Yizhar’s unflinching portrait of Israel’s primal scene. The book is an absolute must for anyone interested in Middle Eastern literature and history.

S. YIZHAR was the pen name of Yizhar Smilansky, born in Rehovot, Palestine in 1916. A long-time member of Knesset for the ruling MAPAI (Labor) party, he is perhaps most famous as the author of Khirbet Hiz’eh and the 1,156-page magnum opus Days of Tziklag, about the 1948 war. After winning the Israel Prize in 1959, he taught education at the Hebrew University for many years and lapsed into literary silence until 1992, when he published the first of a trilogy of autobiographical novels, Preliminaries. He died in 2006.

Yaacob Dweck has previously translated Haim Sabato's Dawning of the Day (2006).

The Seventh Gate

Richard Zimler

Constable & Robinson ISBN 9781845294878

In the Author's Note to The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, Richard Zimler described how he discovered a long-lost 16th-century manuscript in an Istanbul cellar written by a Portuguese kabbalist named Berekiah Zarco. More than 400 years later, Isaac Zarco becomes convinced by the pact between Hitler and Stalin - and other 'signs' - that an apocalyptic prophesy made by his ancestor is about to come terribly true. Is he mad to believe that by decoding these ancient kabbalistic texts he might be the one to save the world?

Set in 1930s Berlin, during the Nazis' rise to power, The Seventh Gate brings together Sophie Riedesel, an intelligent, artistic, and sexually adventurous fourteen-yearold with Isaac Zarco and his friends, most of whom are Jews, ex-circus performers and underground activists. When a series of forced sterilizations, brutal murders and 'disappearings' to concentration camps decimates the group, Sophie must fight with all her ingenuity and guile to save all that she loves about Germany - at any cost. In its beautifully shaped portraits and in its chilling but sensuous evocation of Berlin in the 1930s, The Seventh Gate is at one and the same time a love story and tragedy - and a tale of ferocious heroism.

Guardian of the Dawn

Constable ISBN 9781841197715

By the time the 16 th century was drawing to a close in the Portuguese colony of Goa , the Catholic Inquisition was making excellent progress. ‘Sorcerers' – whether native Hindus or immigrant Jews – who refused to betray others or give up their beliefs were either strangled by executioners or burnt alive in public autos-da-fé . The Zarco family manages to stick firm to its Portuguese-Jewish roots until, as the children reach adulthood, both father and son are betrayed to the Inquisition. Gradually, the truth of the family's destruction is revealed.

The consequences are devastating. Impeccably researched, Guardian of the Dawn is both a riveting historical mystery and, in its exploration of the nature of evil, a powerful reinterpretation of Othello.

Hunting Midnight

Constable ISBN 9781841197715

This novel of incomparable scope and beauty takes the reader on an epic journey from war-ravaged 19th century Europe to antebellum America. In lush, luminous prose, Richard Zimler has written a dazzling work of historical fiction, played out against a backdrop of war and chaos, that unforgettably mines the mysteries of devotion, betrayal, guilt and forgiveness.

The Search for Sana

Constable ISBN 9781845290788

In February 2000, Richard Zimler went to the Perth Writers’ Festival and met a talented dancer who told him how much his novel The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon had meant to her. The tragic step she would take the next day would change Zimler´s life forever, and launch him into an intense, three-year investigation of her past.
He uncovers the story of two girls – one Palestinian, one Israeli – as he led through 1950s Haifa, through a web of illusion and deceit and finally to September 11, 2001, when the tragedy he witnessed in Perth is set in the starkest of political contexts.
The Search for Sana blurs the conventional boundaries between fact and fiction as it examines the nature of true friendship, and the inception of an unthinkable crime. Written by the author of bestsellers about Jewish culture and history, it is also a moving exploration of issues that affect us all.

The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

Arcadia Books ISBN 9781900850315

The year is 1506, and the streets of Lisbon are seething with fear and suspicion when Abraham Zarco is found dead, a naked girl at his side. Abraham was a renowned kabbalist, a practitioner of the arcane mysteries of Jewish mysticism at a time when the Jews of Portugal were forced to convert to Christianity. Berekiah, a talented young manuscript illuminator, investigates his beloved uncle’s murder, and discovers in the kabbalah clues that lead him deep into the labyrinth of secrets in which the Jews of Portugal sought to hide from their persecutors

Journey into the Past

Stefan Zweig

Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

Pushkin Press ISBN 9781906548094

Separated for nine years by the First World War Louise has finally returned home, reconciled at last with the woman he had so passionately loved, and who had promised to wait for him.  Previously divided by wealth and class, both are now married and much changed by their experiences. Confronted with an uncertain future, and still haunted by the past, they discover whether their love has survived hardships, betrayals, and the lapse of time.
Zweig's long-lost final novella - recently discovered in manuscript form - is a poignant examination of the angst of nostalgia and the fragility of love.

The World of Yesterday

Pushkin Press ISBN 9781906548124

Zweig’s final work, posted to his publisher the day before his tragic death, brings the destruction of a war-torn Europe vividly to life. Written as both a recollection of the past, and as a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna; its seeming permanence, its promise, and its devastating fall.

A truthful and passionate account of the horror that tore apart European culture, The World of Yesterday gives us insight into the history of a world brutally destroyed, written by a master at the height of his literary talent.

Wondrak and Other Stories

Pushkin Press ISBN 9781901285864

Compulsion, In the Snow and Wondrak all concern Zweig's strong anti-war feelings following the First World War. The artist Ferdinand, central figure of Compulsion, partly reflects Zweig's own experience. In The Snow tells of the plight of a group of Jews who freeze to death while trying to escape a medieval pogrom. In Wondrak, a woman, disfigured since birth, attempts to save her only child from being drafted into the military.
In this newly available English translation the reader discovers the essential humanist preoccupations of the author of Amok and Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman: his compassion towards human suffering, his horror of war and his faith in idealism, generosity, love - values that can, in an instant, illuminate an entire existence.


STEFAN ZWEIG was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian - Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoyed literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide

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