In a house in a quiet street in North London, Helena struggles with her self-appointed task of writing a book about the reclusive American artist Joseph Cornell. At the same time she dreams and thinks about her sister Alice working in an orphanage in Chechnya. She is certain that Alice despises her for living a life of comfort and privilege, far away from the horrors of war; yet she knows too that her work is more than self-indulgence. How to reconcile these two visions? Enter Ed, a Czech journalist and photographer who claims he has been working in Chechnya and brings news of Alice, along with the request for a bed for the few days he has to be in London. Gabriel Josipovici’s sparkling new novel charts the course of those few days, as Joseph Cornell’s mysterious life and the strange boxes he constructed wage a silent struggle in Helena’s mind and spirit with the imperatives of the present.

Taking its name from Bach's Goldberg Variations, as well as inspiration from its formal structure, this work hybridizes breezy philosophical meditation and fragment-based novel. Most of the diffused story takes place in nineteenth-century England, where a Jewish writer by the name of Goldberg is commissioned by an incessantly thoughtful insomniac to create a story each day to be told that night, hopefully thus assuaging the man's sleeplessness.

A mysterious web of solitude, love, illness, and loss is seamlessly woven into a captivating historical and personal narrative in this poignant yet concise novel. As three characters move through their increasingly haunting lives, they discover how to piece together their past and recreate connections.

In a Hotel Garden is a provocative work by the English novelist once described by Sir Frank Kermode as "an admirable and rare example of the writer-critic." It is a captivating novella, written almost entirely in dialogue. In a Hotel Garden unfolds character and meaning with a lovely, meditative tension. The narrator Ben relates to his friends his enthralling encounter with a Jewish woman in the Dolomite Alps. The tale of her compulsive visit to a hotel garden in Siena--where her grandmother fell in love with a man soon to be a victim of the Holocaust--illuminates Ben's half-lived life, and raises the question of how we can ever come to terms with the destruction of the European Jews in our century. The Independent in England (where this novel first appeared) said, "Its [the novel's] enigmas are those of life itself, and Josipovici sets them before us with clarity, tact and compassion."