7 results for "Jewish Fiction"

Hearts and minds

Craig, Amanda
Twenty-first-century London draws in thousands of immigrants, filling the spaces unwanted by the legitimate majority - invisible, untraceable and powerless. So a murdered girl, fished from Hampstead Ponds one morning, could be anyone... Here is Job, driving mini-cabs illegally, his wife lives in Zimbabwe; Ian, the supply teacher, a South African exile; New Yorker Katie, jilted, and impoverished; and fifteen-year-old Ukrainian Anna, trafficked into sexual slavery. And Polly Noble, an immigrant lawyer, the descendant of Jewish refugees, knows how easy it is to fall through the cracks. Yet when her au pair, Irene, disappears, Polly hardly imagines that her own needs and beliefs have dragged her family into a world of danger, deceit and terror, which will threaten not only her home, but London itself.
Charnwood 2010 560 pages

The exiled times of a Tibetan Jew

Simons, Jake Wallis
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.
Polygon 2005 292 pages

Seeds of greatness

Canter, Jon
Two friends grow up in a North London Jewish suburb. David is bright, parent-pleasing and obviously destined for great things. But somehow he ends up earning peanuts in a Suffolk bookshop while his devious and wayward friend Jack, becomes rich and famous as a TV chat-show host. When Jack dies, his widow and publisher commission David to write his biography; after all, dependable David can be relied upon not to dish the dirt about the sex, the drugs and the women. David however soon realises that it's finally time he stopped doing what is expected of him. Instead he must write the true story of the forty year friendship that has dominated his life and then maybe he'll get Jack out of his system. But what David soon finds is that he can never be completely free of Jack...
Vintage 2007 343 pages

They won't let you live

Blumenfeld, Simon
They Won't Let You Live is the story of two small shop-owners - one Christian, one Jewish - in 1930s London. Simon Blumenfeld's 4th and final novel, first published in 1939, critically revisits the themes evoked by Shakespeare's The Merchant Of Venice. Blumenfeld sets out to confound the reader's prejudices and expectations in a plot that does not shy away from the difficult and the disturbing. In an ever-growing atmosphere of violence in both public and private life, Blumenfeld explores how language that springs from our emotions and misapprehensions shapes our world and, indeed, how it appears to us.
London Books 2022 250 pages