The Wingate Prize is the most feted Jewish literary award in the UK. From illustrated memoir to contemporary novels and deeply researched history, this year’s 14 titles vying to be declared the best book to deliver the award’s mission to ‘translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader’ cover a broad spectrum of opinions, style and content. 

Here are this year’s picks:

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Wildfire)

The shattering fall out of a kidnapping on the monstrous members of an obscenely rich American family is explored with spiky relish by the author of Fleishman is in Trouble, although be warned: this cocktail is definitely more sour than sweet. As Fitzgerald might have said, the very rich are much more screwed up than you or me.

The Postcard by Anne Berest, trans. Tina Kover (Europa Editions)

A mysterious postcard, bearing merely the names of four family members who died in the Holocaust prompts a story of personal reckoning and often painful family excavation in this auto fictional novel, a best seller in its native France.

The Safekeep by Yael van Der Wouden (Viking)

Van Der Wouden’s tightly written debut also found itself on this year’s Booker shortlist. Set in 1960s Amsterdam it follows the uncoiling relationship between the savagely uptight, desperately lonely Isabel and the strange, brassy, ambiguous Eva against the shadow of Holland’s largely unspoken Nazi past. Almost every sentence crackles with tension.

Final Verdict by Tobias Buck (Orion)

The trial of Bruno Dey, accused in 2019 of murdering more than 5000 people at a concentration camp in Poland, is the starting point for this elegant interrogation of the relationship between historic atrocity and retrospective justice, which wrestles with ideas of guilt, punishment, collective memory and Germany’s ongoing negotiation of its history. Complicating the narrative further for Buck is his grandfather who was an early member of the Nazi party. A book rich with questions for our age.

Spinoza by Ian Buruma (Yale University Press)

Born into a devout Sephardi family during the Dutch Golden Age, Spinoza was effectively banished from the local synagogue after questioning the nature of God, although crucially not his existence. This highly readable biography contextualises his political thinking within an era of great instability and illuminates the ways in which his belief in democracy and rationalism influenced the Enlightenment thinkers to come. A timely book.

Cold Crematorium by József Debreczeni, trans. Paul Olchvary (Jonathan Cape)

There are concentration camp memoirs, and then there is Cold Crematorium, first published in 1950 and now translated into English. Debreczeni was working as a journalist in Hungary in 1944 when he was rounded up; he would spend the next 12 months in a series of desperate slave labour camps. His eye witness account of this secular hell on earth is elevated by his peerless observational skills and, simultaneously, his disconcerting ability to stand slightly apart. “Kitsch. Horror is always kitsch,” he writes. “Even when it’s real.”

Time’s Echo by Jeremy Eichler (Faber)

Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten and Dimitri Shostakovich were variously shaped by their experiences of the Second World War and antisemitism. In this extremely fine book, Jeremy Eichler examines four key works – Strauss’s Metamorphose, Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Britten’s Requiem and Shostakovich’s Symphony No 13 (Babi Yar) – within their particular historical context to explore in ways that combine both critical acumen and near unbearable pathos the ability of music to go beyond words.

Eight Bright Lights by Sara Gibbs (Headline)

One festive wedding, three young women, and a whole host of crises: Sara Gibb’s debut about a Jewish wedding veering off course teems with multiple story lines without ever muddling the reader. Jewishness, Israel and autism are also tossed lightly into the mix. “The kind of fun Jewish rep we need, that doesn’t often show up in British women’s fiction,” said our reviewer.

Elena: A Hand Made Life by Miriam Gold (Jonathan Cape)

Sometimes the joy of a book lies in the telling, rather than the story. This memoir of a grandmother, a Lancashire GP whose family fled Ukraine for Germany in 1920 and who was dispatched alone to England in 1936, never to see her parents again, is, of course, an astonishing tale. But it’s told with palpable beauty, the text incorporating airmail letters, old photographs, newspaper cuttings, cut out paper dolls and embroidery samples. An artefact brimming with riches.

Fervour by Toby Lloyd (Hodder)

Mysticism combines with family secrets in this ambitious debut about a north London Jewish clan. The temporary disappearance of the youngest daughter and mother Hannah’s decision to explore her Jewish father-in-law’s forced collaboration in the Holocaust sets the scene for an explosive showdown.

Sufferance by Charles Palliser (Guernica Editions)

A brilliantly clever novel, said our reviewer of this slyly elusive book about a family who are living under an authoritarian regime within an unnamed city divided into two zones. And then a 13-year-old girl comes to stay. Palliser, best known as author of The Quincunx, refuses trite distinctions between good and bad in this slow burn psychological thriller which keeps the panic levels slowly rising until the very end.

Alfred Dreyfus by Maurice Samuels (Yale University Press)

The significance of the Dreyfus affair on modern Jewishness cannot be overstated – for Theodor Herzl, it “demonstrated the necessity for Jews to exercise sovereignty in a state of their own”. This short biography places the man at the centre of the affair within the context of its unifying impact on contemporary Jewish identity while raising pertinent questions about the relationship between populism and democracy.

Lublin by Manya Wilkinson (And Other Stories)

Set in Poland in the years before the Holocaust, Manya Wilkinson’s novel is part fairy tale, part horror. Three Jewish friends from a Polish village are on their way to Lublin to sell brushes in the market market town, yet as they travel the countryside around them starts to change beyond recognition. A sly meditation on time and its passing, and with it the question of what we cannot know.

My Family by David Baddiel (HarperCollins)

Tolstoy’s understanding that each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way bears spectacular fruit in the case of David Baddiel: his mother not only had an affair with a golf enthusiast; she copied her children when they were adults into the couple’s often sexually explicit emails. Never one to squander good material, Baddiel finds a dicey, indecently enjoyable humour in this sometimes excruciating story of a childhood filled both with love and quite extraordinary levels of transgression.