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Just in for January 2009



When Will There Be Good News

Kate Atkinson

PB £7.99


In rural Devon, six-year-old Joanna Mason witnesses an appalling crime. Thirty years later the man convicted of the crime is released from prison. In Edinburgh, sixteen-year-old Reggie works as a nanny for a G.P. But Dr. Hunter has gone missing and Reggie seems to be the only person who is worried. Across town, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe is also looking for a missing person, unaware that hurtling towards her is an old friend - Jackson Brodie - himself on a journey that becomes fatally interrupted.



Something To Tell You

Hanif Kureishi

PB £7.99

Jamal Khan, a psychoanalyst in his fifties living in London, is haunted by memories of his teens: his first love, Ajita; the exhilaration of sex, drugs and politics; and a brutal act of violence which changed his life for ever. As he and his best friend Henry attempt to make the sometimes painful, sometimes comic transition to their divorced middle age, balancing the conflicts of desire and dignity, Jamal's teenage traumas make a shocking return into his present life.



Freud's War

Helen Fry

HB £20.00

Despite his worldwide reputation as the father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud's security in his native Vienna changed overnight when Hitler's forces annexed Austria on 12 March 1938. His books had already been burned across Germany, and now he and his family were at immediate risk. The Nazis carried out regular raids on Jewish families' homes, and the Freuds were no exception. They suffered a period of house arrest and two months of uncertainty before finally securing papers for emigration to England and making a dramatic, last-minute escape. Following their escape from Austria, both Sigmund's son Martin and his grandson Walter enlisted in the British Forces, going on to fight for Britain behind enemy lines in Austria. Using previously unpublished family archives and photographs, including correspondence and Sigmund Freud's diary, Helen Fry opens a window into the Freuds' family life both in pre-War Vienna, and during the Second World War in Britain, with their homeland under the influence of the Nazis.



Netherland

Joseph O'Neill

PB £7.99


In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal. In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off-kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the powercut and the Iraq war. Those years were difficult for Hans -- his English wife Rachel left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and silences in their marriage, and he spent two strange years in New York's Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents. Lost in a country he'd regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in a most alien place -- the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city's most marginal parks. It was during these games that Hans befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreamed of establishing the city's first proper cricket field. Over the course of a summer, Hans grew to share Chuck's dream and Chuck's sense of American possibility -- until he began to glimpse the darker meaning of his new friend's activities and ambitions.'Netherland' is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between.



The Genizah at the House of Shepher

Tamar Yellin

PB £8.99


Returning to Jerusalem after a long absence, Shulamit Shepher becomes embroiled in a family feud over possession of the so called Shepher Codex, a mysterious and valuable Torah manuscript discovered in her grandparents' attic genizah, a depository for old or damaged sacred documents. In unravelling the origins of the codex, Shulamit uncovers not only her ancestors' history but must reconsider her own past, her present and ultimately, her choices for the future. The tale of the family Shepher, their aspirations, feuds, and love affairs, is a haunting one of exile and belonging, displacement and the struggle for identity."The Genizah at the House of Shepher" has received numerous awards, including Jewish Book Council's inaugural 2007 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature; and "Hadassah" Magazine's Ribalow prize. It has been short listed for "Jewish Quarterly's" Wingate Prize


The Girl Who Played With Fire

Stieg Larsson

HB £16.99

Lisbeth Salander is a wanted woman. Two Millennium journalists about to expose the truth about the sex trade in Sweden are brutally murdered, and Salander's prints are on the weapon. Her history of unpredictable and vengeful behaviour makes her an official danger to society - but no-one can find her anywhere. Meanwhile, Mikael Blomkvist, editor-in-chief of Millennium, will not believe what he hears on the news. Knowing Salander to be fierce when fearful, he is desperate to get to her before she is cornered and alone. As he fits the pieces of the puzzle together, he comes up against some hardened criminals, including the chainsaw-wielding 'blond giant' - a fearsomely huge thug who can feel no pain. Digging deeper, Blomkvist also unearths some heart-wrenching facts about Salander's past life. Committed to psychiatric care aged 12, declared legally incompetent at 18, this is a messed-up young woman who is the product of an unjust and corrupt system. Yet Lisbeth is more avenging angel than helpless victim - descending on those that have hurt her with a righteous anger terrifying in its intensity and truly wonderful in its outcome.



The J-Word

Andrew Sanger

PB £7.99

'Did I say I was Jewish? I should be Jewish all of a sudden?' Argumentative, Yiddish-speaking, 80-year-old Jack Silver has reluctantly returned to Golders Green to care for his 10-year-old grandson, Danny. Unpredictable and outspoken but warm-hearted, Jack is resolutely secular and repudiates everything Jewish. His profoundly troubled son, now a successful middle-aged journalist, has followed in his footsteps, while the brilliant young Danny has been kept in ignorance of his heritage. When Jack is beaten up by an antisemitic gang, it changes everything. He and Danny secretly set out to outwit and track down the thugs and bring them to justice. The hunt takes Jack into memories of his own childhood and the two unlikely heroes discover a shared identity spanning generations that eventually draws the whole family together.



The Man Who Owns the News

Michael Wolff

HB £20.00

In a career spanning four decades Rupert Murdoch has built News International into a $70 billion corporation. Through a series of breathtaking gambles he expanded from his base in the Australian newspaper business to achieve a preeminent position in the UK's media, and to control a huge slice of Hollywood. Increasingly his company has built a presence in online and digital media, most recently through its acquisition of MySpace, and he is steadily expanding into Southeast Asia. But Murdoch is more than a predatory and merciless deal-maker. His company does not only generate dizzying profits and growth rates. His company generates the information that forms our understanding of the world. He presides over what we read, what we watch, what we come to believe about ourselves, to an extent that is without serious parallel anywhere on earth.In the words of Michael Wolff, Murdoch 'held more power over more time than any other contemporary figure'. Working with unrivalled access to Murdoch himself, his family, and his inner circle of advisors, Wolff shows how Murdoch came to wield this power and the uses he has made of it. Murdoch has become almost invisible behind the strong emotions he provokes. Now Wolff's account reveals the qualities that took Murdoch to the top of the world and have kept him there. In doing so he tells a business story that is also the story of a man's life, and the story of our times .



The Enchantress of Florence

Salman Rushdie

PB £7.99

A tall, yellow-haired young European traveler calling himself 'Mogor dell 'Amore', the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar's grandfather Babar: Qara Koz, 'Lady Black Eyes', a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who is taken captive first by an Uzbek warlord, then by the Shah of Persia, and finally becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune, commander of the armies of the Ottoman Sultan. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerized by her presence, and much trouble ensues."The Enchantress of Florence" is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man's world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other - the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the equally sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture, where Argalia's boyhood friend 'il Machia' - Niccolo Machiavelli - is learning, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. These two worlds, so far apart, turn out to be uncannily alike, and the enchantments of women hold sway over them both. But is Mogor's story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess? And if he's a liar, must he die?



Jewish Travel Guide 2009


PB £13.95


New and improved for 2009.


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