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The World: A Family History by Simon Sebag Montefiore Weidenfeld & Nicolson £14.99
It requires a confident historian to take on a history of just about everything, but Simon Sebag Montefiore is no stranger to weighty topics. Having previously covered Stalin, the Romanovs and Jerusalem, Montefiore uses a neat device to walk us through centuries of conflict and chaos; exploring the families that have shaped the tide of history.
There are the expected big machers in there – the Medicis, the Kennedys and the Bonapartes – but some lesser-known names, including the rulers of Haiti, Benin and Hawaii, as well as the dynasties that continue to influence our world, like the Kims and the Saudis. Naturally, there’s also a dive into the Rothschilds. An alternative and enlightening take on the story of humanity – one that will certainly keep you intrigued wherever in the world you’re reading it.
Acts of service
By Lilian Fishman
Europa Press £12.99
Sally Rooney has a lot to answer for. The millennial wonderkind has become the poster child for meditative novels where attractive young things have lots of sex, and spend even more time angsting about it.
Certainly everyone in Acts of Service is quirky and slightly bohemian, and it’s no spoiler to say they end up in bed together (a lot).
Our heroine, Eve, is an aimless graduate working as a waitress, ostensibly loved up with an older girlfriend.
But she finds herself drawn into a menage-a-trois with a wealthy businessman, Nathan, and his lover Olivia, and extracting herself proves challenging. But is sex ever just sex, or is it always about power too?
Where is the line between obsession and abuse? This won’t be for everyone, but Fishman has marked herself out as a contender for Rooney’s crown.
all our yesterdays
All Our
Yesterdays
By Natalia Ginzburg
Daunt Books £10.99
v Born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, the Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg, who died in 1991, wrote extensively about her country’s political history and its anti fascist struggles, exploring in particular the impact of both on family life: her Jewish husband was murdered in 1944 for his political activities.
Daunt are currently reissuing her novels, of which All Our Yesterdays is one of her best — a panoramic, richly satisfying story of two Italian families as their lives are inexorably shaped by the encroaching war.
Ginzburg’s deceptively offhand style is disarming: as the toll of everyday wartime experiences grows, her novel deepens in intensity. A terrific new discovery.
Last restort
Last Resort
By Andrew Lipstein
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £14.99
v How far you’ll get with Andrew Lipstein’s darkly comic debut depends on your tolerance for self-absorbed pseudo-intellectual hipsters. A young writer is lunching with his insufferable book agent on the brink of a life-changing signing.
Only Caleb’s story isn’t entirely his own, and its originator forces him into a Faustian pact that sees Caleb’s name left off the published work. Caleb gets the payout. But what is success without public glory?
And where does ownership of one’s story begin and end?
That Caleb is someone you’d dread sitting next to a dinner party could be seen as a barrier to enjoyment, yet his predicament and inevitable downfall is highly entertaining.
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The Man Who Sold Air In The Holy Land
By Omer Friedlander
John Murray £12.99
Short stories are always handy to have in the back pocket while travelling – after all, plenty of holiday makers are likely to be spending a lot of time in departure lounges this summer.
This new collection by the young Jerusalem born writer Omer Friedlander and set in his native Israel hardly offers care free escapism, given the extent to which Arab Israeli relations hover in the background.
Yet Friedlander’s humane explorations of love, friendship and the unending cost of conflict, against backdrops that range from orange groves in Jaffa to a check point in Gaza, are in turn funny, tender and achingly compassionate.
Meant to be Mine
Meant To Be Mine
By Hannah Orenstein
Headline £9.99
THIS IS a warm frothy bath of a book that just screams “read on a sun-lounger”.
Jewish New Yorker Edie Meyer has a “meet-cute” on a plane with charming musician Theo; the twist is that she knows the relationship is meant to be, because her grandmother has prophesised the day each family member will meet their soulmate.
Edie has let her supposed destiny guide her choices up until now.
But as the relationship unfolds, she begins to wonder whether she ought to be taking charge of her romantic fate. Featuring plenty of kosher trimmings and a glamorous post-Covid Manhattan setting, this is entirely predictable and implausible, and an awful lot of fun.
The Jewish girl in Paris
A Jewish Girl
In Paris
By Melanie Levensohn
Macmillan £16.99
WHEN IT COMES TO Holocaust novels, my preference is for stories inspired by real events.
But Levensohn’s novel – inspired by her discovery of a distant relative who was murdered by the Nazis – is an elegantly drawn tale.
Told in two timelines, as a Frenchwoman in America seeks to uncover a decades-old mystery, it focuses largely on Judith, a Jewish Sorbonne student who falls in love with a wealthy banker’s son just as the Nazis occupy Paris.
If the prose is a tad florid (so much romantic yearning!), and the coincidences far too neat, it is redeemed by a pacy narrative, relatable heroines, and an eye for historical detail about life in occupied France.
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The Latecomer
By Jean Hanff Korelitz
Faber £8.99
Jean Hanff Korelitz excels at compulsive page turners — she is, after all, the author behind recent HBO hit thriller The Undoing.
This effortlessly readable latest centres on the Brooklyn based Oppenheimers, a dysfunctional brood: Salo is indelibly scarred by a traumatic teenage event, while his children, IVF triplets, can’t stand each other.
It’s narrated by their quixotic sister, born 17 years later, although her perspective is omniscient, meaning the reader has full access to each Oppenheimer’s point of view.
It’s a leisurely, ultimately hopeful exploration of familial disunity with a sharp, often amused eye on modern identity politics: the chapter in which one triplet invites his Mormon college friends to an inclusive seder is absolutely priceless.
The Summer Place
The Summer Place
By Jennifer Weiner
Hachette £14.99
It’s a travesty that Jennifer Weiner is not better loved in the UK.
The author of more than 20 novels, from In Her Shoes (adapted into a Cameron Diaz / Toni Collette film) to the absolutely gripping Mrs Everything, she excels at writing about ordinary people dealing with everyday stuff, from dieting and dating to divorce and generational divides, like an American Jewish Marian Keyes.
Her latest kicks off at a post-pandemic Shabbat dinner where a surprise engagement is announced.
Told from multiple perspectives, the novel’s characters are wonderfully specific, and you’ll find yourself rooting for every one of them to find their happily ever afters.
