RaveThe Spectator (UK)The Imposters is Tom Rachman’s fifth book in just over a decade. It is also his best – full of twists and surprises. Each chapter follows a different individual and captures their life in just a few pages ... Each chapter is a short story in its own right, but when key characters turn up again elsewhere, the connection invariably is with Dora, until you start to wonder whether they might be the creations of this novelist, whose memory is perhaps not as bad as we thought. The Imposters is clever and full of tricks from start to finish. It is also very moving.
Deborah Levy
PositiveJewish ChronicleThe first 200 pages are a curiously uninteresting read ... But then towards the end this melancholic novel takes off. The writing gets better. The plot becomes more gripping.
Keiron Pim
RaveThe Jewish ChroniclePim is particularly good on Roth’s Jewishness, his fascination with the east European Jews of his childhood, the antisemitism in wartime Galicia, in early 20th-century Vienna and, of course, in Nazi Germany ... The last chapters make desperate reading as Roth flees the Nazis. Drink finally killed him. He died in a Paris hospital, strapped to a hospital bed so he couldn’t escape. It’s a dark story, movingly told.
Vasily Grossman, trans. by Elizabeth Chandler and Robert Chandler
RaveThe Jewish ChronicleGrossman’s descriptions are unsparing ... This is Grossman’s genius. In a few lines he can evoke a whole life ... The People Immortal is shorter than Grossman’s more famous novels and not as dark and complex ... His account of the German invasion of a Soviet village is extraordinary, the best chapter in the novel ... It is an indispensable companion piece to his other works, casting a new light on the complexities of Grossman’s career. But, above all, it reminds us of the horrors of war and why Grossman was one of the greatest chroniclers of the Second World War in all its inhumanity.
Joshua Cohen
RaveThe JCIt’s a delightful mix—part campus novel, part history of Zionism—crackling with humour, intelligence and moments when the dark history of the Jews explodes into the story ... the best parts of the novel are the big set-piece events when the grandparents come for dinner, Edith’s parents for Rosh Hashanah and Ruben’s parents for Thanksgiving. Picture both sets of parents from The Marvelous Mrs Maisel and make them ten times more argumentative and difficult and you get the picture ... as good as anything Cohen has written. Clever, funny, dark, deeply moving, full of references to everyone from Nabokov and the Marx Brothers to Jabotinsky and the late Harold Bloom, The Netanyahus is a joy to read.
Yaniv Iczkovits, trans. by Orr Schar
RaveThe JCThe novel is full of fascinating historical detail. Iczkovits has done his research. But, best of all, is the writing. He is a born storyteller. The novel is packed with terrific characters ... Iczkovits moves between the present and the past creating a fascinating backstory for his characters. The plot races along. This is a book you will not want to put down. It’s full of energy, part farce, part adventure story. Iczkovits is clearly a talent to watch and The Slaughterman’s Daughter is the place to start.
Philippe Sands
RaveNew Statesman (UK)... a fascinating follow-up to East West Street ... Sands...makes a compelling case for Wächter’s guilt as a Nazi war criminal ... Sands’ book is superbly researched and brilliantly told ... The book is full of fascinating characters and at times reads like Graham Greene’s The Third Man ... The Ratline—part history, part thriller—is a superb companion piece [to East West Street], shedding light on the astonishing cynicism of the early years of the Cold War, when Nazis, Americans and Catholic clergy made strange bedfellows. Both should be read together. They are a fascinating account of the war between law and barbarism.
Martin Amis
PositiveThe Jewish Chronicle (UK)\"The novel is too long, largely dull and should have been better edited. There is too much irritating name dropping...and verbiage ... The references to Trump are predictable and uninteresting. Confusingly, some names are changed, some are not ... The memoir, though, is fascinating ... There is much talk about sex, drink and cigarettes, but the best talk is about politics and death. When Bellow and Hitchens are centre-stage the \'novel\' really comes to life. The mood darkens, the book grows up. The descriptions of Bellow’s decline into dementia and Hitchens’s battle with cancer are excellent. They are Martin Amis at his best, and that is very good indeed.
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A B Yehoshua, trans. by Stuart Schoffman
PositiveJewish CurrentsIt’s a story about two generations. Maimoni and Luria’s son represent the new, young Israel. Luria and Maimoni’s father, represent the old Israel born around the time of Independence. But there are also two other Israels: one of cities, engineers, medicine and technology; the other of deserts, Palestinians and small villages ... What starts as a novel about a man’s dementia and memory-loss becomes a story of national memory, with crucial references to the Lebanon war and Rabin. Luria can no longer drive because of his dementia. He is offered a lift. He says it’s fine to drop him off at Yitzhak Rabin’s grave. \'You mean the memorial monument?’ ‘Of course, only for the memory.’
Alex Halberstadt
RaveThe Jewish Chronicle... terrific, gripping ... a superb evocation of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and ’70s, a world of drab poverty and oppression, but also young rebels listening to pop music, wearing western fashions and reading dissident poetry.
Etgar Keret
PositiveThe Jewish Chronicle... feels very hip and happening ... [Keret\'s] writing is what is really thrilling in this book. The prose is clever, the tone cool and often funny. The plots twist and turn, full of postmodern trickery ... The revelations and endings of these stories are simply brilliant ... Keret has a terrific turn of phrase ... what makes Keret \'completely unlike any writer\'— according to Salman Rushdie — is the way he moves between sadness and menace. He is a master of melancholy, telling of lonely, divorced men, but also of terror. Is the narrator a loser, or is he a psychopath? You read on, nervously, to find out. And then comes the twist.
Howard Jacobsen
PositiveThe Jewish ChronicleLive a Little...has a Shakespearean feel, but that of a comedy...Much Ado perhaps. Fast and clever ... As the narrative develops, the plot twists more and more, the dialogue gets faster and cleverer, and the past is harder to shake off. Memories, if you can remember them at all, are more tenacious. The novel’s brilliant cover tells it all: hearts and skulls, love and death.
Robert Menasse, Trans. by Jamie Bulloch
RaveThe Jewish ChronicleThe storytelling is clever but also dark ... Above all, the novel is European, far removed from our own Brexit chaos. It is about Europe reconnecting with its ideals via a tragic past, full of cemeteries and corpses. It’s a smart read, unlike anything being written in Britain today.
