A family prepares for and celebrates shabbat.

"Quiet Street" is the story of Edith and Jacob Hirsch and their two children, Dinah and Teddy, who live in a suburb of Jerusalem among neighbors they have known for many years. Edith's protected life comes to an end when she must face the bitter fact that her beautiful daughter at eighteen is more a soldier than a farmer and that the kibbutz where Dinah now lives is a military fortress, despite its newly planted orchards. The heroic sacrifices, the well-meaning mistakes, and the suspicions of a people living through the grueling 1948 siege of Jerusalem weave together into a dramatic portrayal of ordinary people in times of deep unrest. Originally published in 1951, "Quiet Street" was one of the first American novels published about the Israeli war for independence. Told from the mother's perspective, "Quiet Street" shows the devotion and wrenching cost required to make an ancient dream of a new state into a modern reality.

In an isolated trailer home in the far north of Japan, an old criminal scrutinizes his tattooed skin while he waits for the past to catch up with him. A year later, the life of a young policeman breaks down as he investigates a tattooed corpse and the history of death and guilt embedded in its skin. From the Japanese underworld to midnight in the London Zoo aquarium, Skin charts the lives of people in a world made stark and fantastical. The grief of a young computer programmer who cannot erase the ghostly memories of his twins. The vicious logic of the games played by children while their parents sip drinks under parasols. And London Zoo, where the disappearance of dead animals is blamed on the 'Featherman', an eerie bodysnatcher who passes through London's wastelands and derelict spaces, leaving no trace for the feathers of green humming-birds.

A successful woman in her early forties, Eleanor feels curiously distanced from her beloved husband and children, enthralled by the odd tyranny of her family past, and at the nadir of her self-esteem when she innocently enters into adultery

When Jo Green takes a nannying job in London to escape her small-town routine, complicated family, and perfect-on-paper boyfriend Shaun, culture shock doesn't even begin to describe it. Dick and Vanessa Fitzgerald are the most incompatible pair since Tom and Jerry, and their children - glittery warrior pixie Cassandra, bloodthirsty Zak and shy little Tallulah - are downright mystifying. Suddenly village life seems terribly appealing. Then, just as Jo's getting the hang of their designer lifestyle, the Fitzgeralds acquire a new lodger and suddenly she's sharing her nanny flat with the distractingly good-looking but inexplicably moody Josh. So when Shaun turns up, things get even trickier... A heartwarming, laugh out loud romantic novel with a fantastically dysfunctional family and complicated love triangle to amuse every reader.

The novel centres on a colourful group of refugee Tibetans. One of the group's members, the charismatic (and slightly dubious) Rabbi Chod, recognises himself as the reincarnation of Moses, and various friends as reincarnations of key Biblical figures. Despite condemnation from both the mainstream Jewish and Tibetan communities, he declares his followers the true 'lost tribe of Israel', and defiantly opens up a synagogue in a pet shop. a family where suppression and dysfunction are common currency. Both of his parents are Tibetan Jews, followers of Rabbi Chod. His father owns a cafe called 'Hush Hush', so called because within the cafe, all forms of noise are forbidden. Any customer who speaks is instantly banned and a Polaroid photo of them is pinned to a cork board in case they should dare to return. way not into the future, but the past. He falls asleep each night only to wake up the day before. In this way, as he grows up his parents get younger. By the end of the book his parents are children - too young to manage by themselves - and the adult Monlam has to look after them. In this way he witnesses his own family history, quite literally living backwards into their lives.

Of course, I've always had a secret. Have I always known it? I suppose I did, in a way - in the way that children know such things. That is, I knew and didn't know.In this novel, Eva Hoffman explores various kinds and strata of secrets: intimate secrets and secrets of family past: the kinds of secrets that can be decoded from clues, and the kind that themselves seem to offer tantalizing clues to the fundamental mysteries of the human selfhood. This is a story about a peculiarly powerful mother daughter bond and about a haunting, about a young womans quest for individuation and the challenges posed by contemporary science to our deepest notions of individuality. Using the near future to reflect on the conditions of the present, Hoffman has written self knowledge a novel of ideas for our time, and an imaginative fable whose resonance is timeless.

The Bear Boy is a story specific to time and place, and about the dislocation of time and place too. It is set in 1935 at the only moment in history when the idea of socialism flickered to life in the United States, when Jewish intellectuals were fleeing out of the country where they were once respected writers and professors, and when a great many people were equal to each other in that the most had little material wealth. The oversize Mitwisser clan are German refugees who survive at the whim of their vagabond benefactor, James Albair. James is heir to the fortune amassed by his father, the author of a wildly popular series of children's books called The Bear Boy. Wayward, feckless and with money to burn, James has taken up the eccentric Mitwissers - scholarly patriach, invalid wife, and five scrappy children - as his latest caprice. Into this chaotic household comes Rose Meadows, orphaned at the age of eighteen. Rose quickly becomes indispensable as assistant to Professor Mitwisser in his research on an arcane sect and then, inevitably, as general nursemaid, nanny and companion to the entire family. Her sole inheritance is a book: the first title in the Bear Boy series. When the actual Bear Boy appears on the Mitwisser doorstep, Rose must resist the pull of his reckless orbit as she pursues her own desires. The Bear Boy evokes Depression-era New York from the perspective of perpetual outsiders. Brought together by coincidence and fate, the hard times they inherit still hold glimmers of past wonders and future dreams.

In an ambitious departure from her usual form, Anita Brookner expands her canvas in Family and Friends to create a richly textured novel about the life of a wealthy Jewish family in London, focusing on the generation that came to maturity between the two World Wars. Presiding over the Dorn household is the formidable Sofka, an elegant and circumspect widow who watches as her four children find their way into adulthood. Frederick, the sybaritic eldest son, escapes to the comforts of the Riviera while stern, dutiful Alfred runs the family business and burns with unrealized longings; Betty—pleasure-loving, vain, and selfish—makes her ambitious way from Paris to Hollywood, leaving her dreamy, passive sister Mimi to languish at home. A brilliant social novel of lost innocence and the complex nature of family bonds, Family and Friends meticulously portrays the emotional cost of everyday life.

World known Russian writer Anatoly Rybakov, the author of the Dirk, Bronze Bird, Children of Arbat, Heavy Sand and many other stories, novels, screenplays and TV serials was the founding President of the Russian PEN Centre. Harrison Salisbury says: "The epic tragedy of Stalin's Russia has never been written with such pervasive and dramatic terror as by Anatoli Rybakov in his semi-fictional novel, Fear". "Once read, it is a tale which will be engraved on the mind of the reader for life." .... The San Francisco Chronicle says: " A landmark in Soviet literary history.... Rybakov is a major talent."

As the result of a series of fortuitous encounters and circumstances, the Italian writer Giacomo Longhi falls victim to an obsessive curiosity about the famous English artist Julian Sax. He would like to meet Sax, but the great painter is surrounded by an almost impenetrable protective screen. The writer’s wife, the charming and sensuous Rossa, eventually takes him to a tea room in London, where Sax spends a few hours of each day accompanied by his children, models and friends. The narrator begins to fear that his wife Rossa might succumb to the charms of this seductive man, who attracts women, paints them and then discards them. In an unpredictable sequence of events, Elkann weaves a fascinating web that blends reality and fiction, and draws the reader into the lives of characters who will prove hard to forget.

Between writing her bestselling novels, Caroline Lawrence has penned several short stories, covering incidents alluded to in the novels, but not dramatised at length. This book brings together all the mini-mysteries to date to provide even more coverage of events in the lives of our four detectives during the dangerous, exciting reign of Emperor Titus.

A child compares the size of various items and discovers that she is the tallest of all. Includes suggested learning activities.

One-by-one, the members of the Shivers family disappear from the inside of their chilly refrigerator home.

Recently widowed and increasingly lonely, Roswell Clark's life had arrived at the point when he felt he needed a tattoo. His ideal image was that of a bat featured on an eighteenth-century bowl in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but strangely, on a visit to the museum, he encountered a woman called Sarah Varley, who was clearly compelled by the same bat. What did it mean? Sarah dealt in antiques and Roswell soon ran into her stalls in Chelsea and Covent Garden. His calling, which grew out of an obsession with crash-test dummies, was a bit harder to explain. It led from the invention of a popular children's toy to lucrative commissions from a Parisian sybarite for wooden working models with very adult moving parts. Both Roswell and Sarah had lost their spouses and were still grieving in their different ways. And then Christ started putting a hand in - literally - when a fragment of an ancient crucifix fetched up in one of Sarah's antique lots. Between some compulsion conveyed by this hand and Sarah's natural urge to make improvements in people, Roswell's work took a surprising new turn... Russell Hoban's delicious new novel combines much about art - traditional and conceptual - with new angles on Christ, crash-test dummies, antiques, pornography and a charming tale of romance.

-- Brimming with Elkin's comic brilliance and singular wordplay, The Magic Kingdom tells the story of Eddy Bale, who, determined to learn from the ghastly experience of his son's long, drawn-out death, decides to raise enough money to take seven terminally ill children to Disney World in order to give them a dream vacation before they die. -- Stanley Elkin, a two-timer winner of the National Book Critics Award and three-time nominee for the National Book Award, is widely considered to be one of the most important writers of the contemporary period. Author of over a dozen novels and short story collections, his works include The Franchiser, George Mills, and Mrs. Ted Bliss. -- First published by Dutton (1985), most recent paperback by Thunder's Mouth (1991).

The corruptible power of money and ambition in American politics begins in Venice where a Washington woman reporter trying to repair a bad marriage suddenly spots a professional jeweler, a key figure in the world of Washington’s powerful social and political elite. When she returns to Washington she is shocked to discover that the jeweler has not returned and has, in effect, disappeared. This piques her curiosity and what she uncovers goes to the heart of political corruption on a grand scale; deals with diamonds smuggled into the country to finance a Presidential political campaign and how money and politics impacts on family, children, friends and lovers. This tantalizing and complex thriller deals with the dark side of ambition and the lengths people will go in an effort to attain political power.

"As a boarding school student in the early 1960s, Patrick Modiano lived among the troubled teenage sons of wealthy but self-involved parents. In this mesmerizing novel, Modiano weaves together a series of exquisitely crafted stories about such jettisoned boys at the exclusive Valvert School on the outskirts of Paris: abandoned children of privilege, left to create new family ties among themselves. Misfits and heroes, sports champions and good-hearted chums, the boys of Valvert misbehave, run away, get expelled, and engage in various forms of delinquency and disappearance. They emerge into adulthood tragically damaged, still tethered to their adolescent selves, powerless to escape the central loneliness of their lives in an ever-darkening spiral of self-delusion and grim consequence"--Back cover.

Kayla and Mishalla, two genetically engineered enslaved non-human (GENs), fall in love with higher-status boys, discover deep secrets about the creation of GENs, and in the process find out what it means to be human. Enslaved by their genetics. Oppressed by their creators. Fighting for their humanity. On rugged planet Loka, life for best friends Kayla and Mishalla is arduous at best. They are GENs, Genetically Engineered Non-humans, and in their strict caste system, GENs are at the bottom rung of society. GENs are gestated in a tank and sent to work as slaves as soon as they reach age fifteen. When Kayla is Assigned to care for Zul Manel, the patriarch of a trueborn family, she finds secrets and surprises--not least of which is her budding friendship with Zul's handsome great-grandson. Meanwhile, the children that Mishalla is Assigned to care for are being stolen in the middle of the night, and a strange lowborn boy is hanging around nearby. After weeks of toiling in their Assignments, mystifying circumstances enable Kayla and Mishalla to reunite. Together with the boys, they hatch a plan to save the disappearing children. Yet can GENs really trust humans? Both girls must put their lives and hearts at risk to crack open a sinister conspiracy, revealing secrets no one is ready to face. The first in a trilogy, Tankborn is a page-turning sci-fi thriller that will leave readers scrambling for the sequel! Check out the other titles in this series: TANKBORN * AWAKENING * REBELLION