Fiction - D

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 Circumcision

Gyorgy Dalos

Translated by Judith Sollosy

Marion Boyars ISBN 9780714531236 

Twelve-year-old Robi Singer and best friend Gabor Blum are the only boys in their class who have yet to be circumcised. Robi is worried.

‘What if the knife should slip? How will he show himself in front of the others in the showers? Will he find a wife? And is there plastic surgery to fix up damage of this sort?’

So should he have the circumcision? It seems everyone has an opinion – from friends and teachers at the Jewish School, to his eccentric grandmother and hypochondriac mother – but in the end, the finaldecision is down to Robi…

Gyorgy Dalos was born in Budapest in 1943. Arrested in 1968 for ‘activities against the state’, he was under a publication ban for the next 19 years. From 1995 to 1999 he was the head of the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin and was the curator for Hungarian literature at the 1999 Frankfurt Book Fair. He now lives in Germany.

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Maynard & Jennica

Rudolph Delson

FourthEstate ISBN 978-0007252213

October 2007

Maynard Gogarty is bored, with what he's not quite sure, but he's definitely bored. He's a tweed-suit-wearing, perennially glum thirty something living in a Manhattan flat secretly paid for by his crabby grandmother, and is nursing a short film career that shows no signs of development. Plus he's misanthropic and an unhappy dilettante – a real catch. But recently he's turned over a new leaf: he's decided, whatever befalls him, he's going to be happy.

Enter Jennica Green, who seems to have it all: a Princeton graduate with a high-paying city job and her own apartment. But then again, she's the kind of girl who spends two weeks organising a trip to a county fair, which might explain why she is single and looks like remaining so. When Maynard glimpses this Jewish Bridget Jones on a blazingly hot subway ride, what are the odds…?

Set either side of 9/11, Maynard and Jennica's courtship is narrated by our heroes and their many, many observers, among them all four parents (three living), a Russian-German-Israeli scam artist (and Maynard's current wife), a rapper with a linguistics background, a macaw, and an adolescent trumpeter. On the face of it, ‘Maynard & Jennica’ is about many things: a tree homicide, New York City's real estate boom, hip-hop sampling, the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, the Jewish intermarriage crisis, subway emergency brake etiquette, the tournament rules of scrabble, the naming of cats. At its heart though, this brilliant first novel with its menagerie of voices is a simple love story, as touching as it is hilarious.

Rudy Delson lives in Brooklyn, New York. ‘Maynard and Jennica’ is his first book. He forms part of a whole new generation of young and edgy New York writers on the rise. His work will appeal to fans of Joshua Ferris, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer. The film rights were optioned by Scott Rudin, producer of The Hours, Wonder Boys, and The Queen.

Chez Moi

Agnes Desarthe

Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter

Portobello Books ISBN 9781846271014 

April 2008

How hard can it be to run a restaurant when you've fed fussy children and been a circus caterer? The delightfully dreamy heroine of Agnes Desarthe's playful and piquant new novel is about to find out.

Myriam’s sudden, characteristically impulsive decision to open a restaurant transforms her life in a curious way. For six years, Myriam has been living in self-imposed exile, cut off from her cool, reserved husband and from the son she found herself unable to love, and the opening night of Chez Moi is typically desolate. But little by little, Myriam’s mouth-watering dishes draw people in, first the florist from across the road, followed by the schoolchildren tempted by a four-euro lunch, and then Ben, the most unflappable and devoted of waiters. As the restaurant sizzles towards success, figures and feelings from Myriam’s past also begin to emerge, gradually reawakening her appetite for life, both the bitter parts and the sweet.

Simmering with stories, recipes, observations and dreams, Chez Moi serves up a painfully adult story, with an irresistible sprinkling of wonder and magic.

Agnes Desarthe has written for children and teenagers as well as adult fiction. She has had two previous novels translated into English: Five Photos of My Wife, short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly Prize and Good Intentions.

What Happens Now
Jeremy Dyson
Abacus  ISBN 0-349-11814-0

When 15-year-old Alistair Black gets a part in the hit BBC series THEN AND NOW, everyone tells him it will change his life. But the malign historical events depicted in the TV play start to have an effect on the lives of its child stars, and Alistair's so- called 'opportunity' leads him into increasingly dark territory, culminating in a devastating event with far-reaching consequences. Twenty years on and Alistair's co-star, Alice Zealand, is still struggling to live with what happened. Properly and gloriously in love for the first time - but on the verge of losing it - she too must lay her ghosts to rest to claim a life back for herself. With his flair for creating memorable characters and a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, Jeremy Dyson has written a gripping and often very funny debut novel about love, history, fate, fear and the perils and pleasures of the imagination.