Fiction - C

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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A Short Gentleman

Jon Canter
Jonathan Cape  ISBN 9780224077743

When Robert Purcell, aged eight, read his father's entry in Who’s Who, he saw his own life unfolding before him. Like his father, he’d get a first in Law, then enjoy a distinguished career as a barrister and a judge. For a long time, everything went to plan. Then his life fell apart. He committed a crime. He went to prison.

Now he’s out, his wife has told him to write an account of who he is and why he is who he is. What drove him to his crime? To an English gentleman who loathes the confessional culture such emotional striptease is torture. Nevertheless, A Short Gentleman is that confession. An intellectual giant but an emotional pygmy, Robert struggles to come to terms with the forces that brought him down: Elizabeth, the wife who wanted him to change, Judy Page, the ex-girlfriend who came back to haunt him, Pilkington, the childhood bully who grew into an adult bully, Mike Bell, the old friend Robert was always happy to patronise. Finally, there’s his father, who proved, at the end of his life, not to be the man Robert thought he was.

Despite everything, Robert remains heroically determined to carry on being the same magnificently pompous and self-righteous man he always was, utterly resistant to therapy, change and the emotional demands of the opposite sex.

Seeds Of Greatness

Jon Canter
Vintage  ISBN 9780099492849 

April 2007

Two friends grow up in a North London Jewish suburb. Jack is wayward and devious and gets expelled from school. David is bright and parent-pleasing and destined for great things. But it's Jack who gets rich and famous as a TV chat-show host, while David earns peanuts working in a Suffolk bookshop.

When Jack dies, his widow and publisher commission David to writeJack's authorised biography. David is a gentle, discreet man who can be relied upon not to dish the dirt about Jack. Or his widow. Or his publisher. David will write what they want - something nice and bland.

But David can't do it. He writes Seeds of Greatness instead. It's the truth about his forty-year friendship with Jack, the man who came to dominate his life. It's got sex and drugs and blackmail and jealousy. It's not what he's been paid to write and he knows it can never be published. David thinks that by writing the truth he'll get Jack out of his system. But he finds he'll never be free of Jack. Jack will be with him for as long as he lives. Jon Canter has perfect pitch. Seeds of Greatness is as funny a novel as you'll ever read.

The Song Before it is Sung

Justin Cartwright

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747585947 

February 2008

On July 20, 1944, Adolf Hitler escaped death when an assassin's bombfailed to kill him in his Eastern command, the Wolf's lair. The conspirators were hunted down and hanged from meathooks. Their executions were filmed.

Among those hanged was Axel von Gottberg, who had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Sixty years after his death, his close friend of those days Elya Mendel leaves a legacy of papers and letters to former student Conrad Senior. With the legacy comes a mysterious duty to unravel the past.

The novel is based on the real story of Isaiah Berlin's friendship with Adam von Trott zu Solz.

"Apparently random, even clashing, plot threads are woven together to form a stunning overall design.  He’s a great tale-spinner, a superb craftsman of characters … in this extraordinary novel another major theme is the connection between atheism and morality.  What keeps a man like the fictional Axel von Gottberg, and the real Adam von Trott, defiantly brave in the face of total meaninglessness and personal annihilation?  What explains the blank evil of a man like Hitler? Long after closing this complex, gripping book, you will be still be pondering those questions.” Suzi Feay, Books Quarterly

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Michael Chabon

HarperPerennial ISBN 9780007150939 

March 2008

For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a 'temporary' safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful and complex frontier city that moves to the Yiddish beat. Now, after sixty years of federal neglect, the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown.

But homicide detective Meyer Landsman has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster.

He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life – and also his worst nightmare. And then someone's got the nerve to commit a murder in the flophouse Landsman calls home. Out of habit, obligation and a half-cocked shot at redemption, he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, and soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil and salvation that are his heritage – and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears.

Gentlemen of the Road

Sceptre ISBN 9780340953556 

November 2008

Gentlemen of the Road is set in the Kingdom of Arran, in the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, A.D. 950. It tells the tale of two wandering adventurers and unlikely soulmates, variously plying their trades as swords for hire, horse thieves and con artists - until fortune entangles them in the myriad schemes and battles that follow a bloody coup in the medieval Jewish empire of the Khazars. Hired as escorts for a fugitive prince, they quickly find themselves half-willing generals in a mad rebellion, struggling to restore the prince`s family to the throne. As their increasingly outrageous exploits unfold, they encounter a wondrous elephant, wily Rhadanite tradesmen, whores, thieves, soldiers, an emperor, and discover the truth about their young royal charge.

The Brodsky Touch

Lana Citron

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747580423

The Brodsky Touch — opposite of  Midas — where  everything one touches turns to shit.
Issy Brodsky is back with a vengeance   - albeit not even her own.  Agent provocateur and lone parent  of Max, Issy Brodsky is a woman on a mission...   this time to make it  as stand up comic … Superstardom  beckons but  it’s a  rocky road to success and there’s much to contend  with; the ties of motherhood, day job, undermining boyfriend, a nemesis, (the  younger, prettier  stand up),  not to mention the odd psycho...

The sequel to the Honey Trap, "A frenetic and intelligent farce that captures the warped mindset of the frazzled mother. Funny and  Vivacious."  Independent

The Moldavian Pimp

Edgardo Cozarinsky

Translated by Nick Caistor

Vintage  ISBN 9780099483755 

July 2007

In a bar in the Buenos Aires suburb of Villa Crespo our narrator recalls his encounters with an old man of Lithuanian descent, Samuel Warschauer, whom he came to know shortly before the man died. Among his papers, he found the script of a curious play entitled The Moldavian Pimp, performed in Yiddish in the poor, Jewish area of the city in 1927-28. The play concerned young Jewish girls from the Ukraine recruited by Jewish pimps to go to Argentina on the promises of freedom and a new life, only to find themselves sold into prostitution. Set in the Argentine capital and Paris, and ranging in time from the 1920s to the present day, Edgardo Cozarinsky’s beautiful and moving novel about Jewish immigrants may be among the few records we have of an extraordinary and little-known twilight society. The Bride from Odessa Translated by Nick Caistor Harvill Press   ISBN 9781843430513  Set in Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Vienna, Budapest and Odessa, both before and after the Second World War, Edgardo Cozarinsky's stories belong to the spirit of Borges and to a great Argentine cosmopolitan tradition: that of the uprooted exile, the plaything of History, who, set down in a strange but proud land, looks back nostalgically to the Europe of his ancestral memory. Cozarinsky's characters are writers, lovers, scholars, artists and dreamers. An ambitious young Jew, about to marry and embark for a new life in Argentina is accosted by an unknown woman who departs with him to Buenos Aires; a pianist in a Buenos Aires nightclub finds himself drawn back to Germany in 1937; an Argentine-American Jew travels to Lisbon to unravel the threads of his grandparents' wartime affair- 'A profound knowledge of the cultures of Mittel-europa, of the literatures of France, the United States and Britain translated into Buenos Aires vernacular, gives Cozarinsky's narratives a fiery intellectual strength and a powerful originality. The Bride from Odessa , in its deceptively quiet manner, belongs on the same shelf as those other sceptical masterpieces, the novels of Joseph Roth and the memoirs of Julien Green.' Alberto Manguel

Dreams of Rescue

Laura Shaine Cunningham

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747577935

A chilling mystery unfolds on a frozen lake

Why is Juliana always cast as the victim in her films? It’s her eyes: “they widen so nicely in terror.” In movies, she has been stabbed, bludgeoned, and once impaled upon a decorative sword. Now it maybe that her once-loving husband is trying to kill her. Or has Juliana become too suggestible?

The elements - a frozen corpse, a stalker and a high-voltage courtroom drama - echo her starring roles, but where are her romantic saviours? The police don’t seem like potential lovers; her lawyer wants her money: life, she discovers, is very different from the movies, especially her own. Even her charming lake resort town turns out to be a façade, hiding a divorce and dysfunction cottage industry.

Taut and beautifully written, Dreams of Rescue turns the female-in-peril story on its head, illuminating the secrets of a dangerous marriage and creating a contemporary tale as powerful as the classics Rebecca and Gaslight.