Fiction - A

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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And remember, feedback is always welcome.

Refusal

Soazig Aaron

Translated by Barbara Bray

Harvill Secker ISBN ISBN: 1843431653

July 2007

This moving and profoundly truthful story is told in the form of diary, kept by Angélika, the sister-in-law and friend of Klara, who, after her release from Auschwitz, wandered through war-ravaged Europe for two months before returning to Paris in August 1945.

Gradually, over a period of six weeks, Klara reveals, with cold anger and pitiless lucidity, the full horror of what she experienced in Auschwitz as she struggles to readapt to normal life.

Not since Sophie’s Choice has a novelist succeeded in conveying – with truth, dignity, power and intelligence – the inhumanity of the death camps and the scars suffered by those who survived them.

A gift from heaven, a marvel of good writing, an unashamed and inventive approximation to the unbearable weight of memory. I have been waiting for some time for an account like Refusal. I did not expect this quality and had not dared hope for it… Soon only fiction – that is the paradox, the mystery of literature – will be able to not merely bring to life, but also enrich this memory. Jorge Semprun  Nouvel Observateur

A must read! GDA

A Simple Story

S.Y. Agnon

Syracuse University Press ISBN 978-0815606185

Originally published in Hebrew 50 years ago, this is the not-so-simple story of a bygone time and place, about passion and the wisdom of community. The author asserts his values of community in a story rich in biblical allusion and redolent of the society in which he was raised.

The first Hebrew writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of the central figures in modern Hebrew fiction, his works deal with the conflict between traditional Jewish life and the modern world, and attempts to recapture the fading traditions of the European shtetl, or township.

Beating for Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg
By Geoff Akers

Geoff Akers, a Scottish academic and writer, well-versed in the poetry of the First World War, has taken Rosenberg’s life (and acknowledging the recent formal biographies amongst his sources) for the subject of a novel. The result is an imaginative and poignant story of the growth of an artist’s mind and the tribulations of a soldier’s career and much is made of the sensitivities of so private a man. It makes vivid reading and when it comes to the poems of the trenches sets them precisely in their context with all the gritty detail of their inspiration having Rosenberg explain his thoughts’ workings to his brothers under fire.

Disobedience
Naomi Alderman

Penguin

In suburban north-west London, where leafy avenues wind into the countryside beyond, the Orthodox Jewish community of Hendon quietly conducts its daily life. Hidden from the gaze of outsiders, the faithful live, work, love and pray, with little concern for the sprawling metropolis outside.

But then a beloved rabbi dies, and his passing brings his wayward daughter home. For the past ten years Ronit has been living the life of a modern New York woman; returning home, she's looking forward to catching up with old friends, perhaps settling old scores. But it soon becomes clear that Hendon and Ronit don't fit. Her home has become a more unsettling place than she had anticipated. And when she is reunited with her childhood girlfriend Esti, who has taken a very different path in life, it's not long before the two women are forced to confront their pasts - and to examine the difficult choices they have made.

Disobedience is a brilliant, unputdownable novel that illuminates a culture that has existed in Britain for centuries, yet remains almost entirely hidden. With incredible insight and enduring wit, Naomi Alderman offers a contemporary take on the search for love, faith and understanding in a world filled with conflicting moral and sexual ideals.

Naomi Alderman has won the second Orange Award for New Writers

Mere Anarchy

Woody Allen

Ebury Press ISBN 0091920213
July 2007

I am greatly relieved that the universe is finally explainable. I was beginning to think it was me.’ Thus begins ‘Strung Out’, Woody Allen’s hilarious application of the laws of the universe to daily life. Mere Anarchy, Woody Allen’s first new collection in 25 years, features 18 witty, wild and intelligent comic pieces – nine of which have never before been in print.

Surreal, absurd, rich in verbal play, bitingly satirical and just plan daft, this collection includes tales of a body double - mistaken for the film’s star - kidnapped by outlaws; a pretentious writer forced to work on the novelisation of a Three Stooges film; a nanny secretly writing an exposé of her Manhattan employers; crooks selling bespoke prayers on ebay; and how to react when you’re asked to finance a Broadway play about the invention and manufacture of the adjustable showerhead.

Laced with his unique brand of humour and reminiscent of some of his finest films, Mere Anarchy is an essential collection of tales by the inimitable Woody Allen.

Five Amber Beads
Richard Aronowitz-Mercer

Flambard Press

Five Amber Beads is the story of two men whose lives are woven together as they seek to discover the truth about their pasts.

Charley Bernstein works in the London art world and is tracing a family history erased by the Holocaust. In his possession is a diary written by a relative in a labour camp during the Third Reich, and Charley must follow the threads leading from its haunting pages to his own present.

In New York an old man, Christopher, is found lying semiconscious on the pavement. There are no witnesses to what has happened to him and he has no form of identification. When he wakes up in a hospital bed he finds he doesn't recognise the city or his own skin. In a state of total amnesia, he must embark on a struggle to regain his memory.

When fate brings these two men together they find themselves linked by a unique friendship. Their journey takes them from America to the Middle East and England in an enthralling and moving novel that addresses the nature of identity and belonging.

Beware of God
By Shalom Auslander

Picador

Outrageously funny and ferociously intelligent, this collection of stories is centred around a series of surreal and profane conceptions of God. Each story is unmistakably Jewish as are the depictions of God, but in the vein of Philip Roth or even Mel Brooks rather than a more orthodox tradition. God appears in a variety of incarnations; as a chain-smoking mafia boss attempting to keep a hold of the death rate of the world; the voice on the car radio instructing Mr. Schwarzman to build an altar in his back garden. He’s also an overbearing CEO with a marketing strategy, though the jury is still out on whether the slogan ‘The Original and Still the Best’ works, or whether to appeal to a different market with ‘The Porsche of Deities’.

Each tale is more bold and inventive than the next,. Yet Auslander possesses the deft skill of making even the most surreal situations completely plausible, often moving and consistently hilarious –where else would we find an enlightened chimp suffering a bout of existential angst, Doughnut and Danish, the observant god-fearing hamsters, and I won’t even attempt to explain the spiritual rollercoaster boarded when ingesting a Friday night dinner...

There is nothing and no one too sacred for Auslander’s shrewd gaze. This emerges in the most unexpected intertextual references used. These include a myriad of prayers to Holocaust educational rhetoric, the golem tale, the Dead Sea Scrolls... even Charlie Brown and Snoopy are swept up into this uncanny world.

Read this book and it will make you laugh until it hurts...and in the long run, it’ll do you a lot more good than a bowl of chicken soup.