The post-office girl is Christine, who looks after her ailing mother and toils in a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after the Great War. One afternoon, as she is dozing among the official forms and stamps, a telegraph arrives addressed to her. It is from her rich aunt, who lives in America and writes requesting that Christine join her and her husband in a Swiss Alpine resort. After a dizzying train ride, Christine finds herself at the top of the world, enjoying a life of privilege that she had never imagined. But Christine’s aunt drops her as abruptly as she picked her up, and soon the young woman is back at the provincial post office, consumed with disappointment and bitterness. Then she meets Ferdinand, a wounded but eloquent war veteran who is able to give voice to the disaffection of his generation. Christine’s and Ferdinand’s lives spiral downward, before Ferdinand comes up with a plan which will be either their salvation or their doom. Never before published in English, this extraordinary book is an unexpected and haunting foray into noir fiction by one of the masters of the psychological novel .

Humiliated and Insulted

Fyodor Dostoevsky  (trans. Ignat Avsey)

PB £9.99

Oscar Wilde claimed that "Humiliated and Insulted" is not 'at all inferior to that other great masterpiece'; Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have wept over it. Its construction is that of an intricate detective novel interwoven with eternally topical themes. There is a new take on jealousy, radically different from Shakespeare's; and the reader is plunged into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma and above all of unrequited love and irreconcilable relationships. At the centre of the story is a young struggling author, a traumatised orphaned teenager, and a depraved aristocrat, who not only foreshadows the great figures of evil in Dostoevsky's later fiction but is a powerful and original presence in his own right. This new translation catches the verve and tumult of the original, which itself - in concept and execution - affords a refreshingly unfamiliar glimpse of the author. In structure it is more ordered, in plot and characterisation, more succinct and balanced than most of his later novels. The reader throughout is moved, shocked and above all - entertained, but never for a moment wearied.

Marjorie Morningstar

Herman Wouk

PB £7.99

A new edition, finally in print again in the UK.
In 1930 sixteen-year-old Marjorie Morgenstern lives with her family on the edge of Central Park. She has just come out into New York society. Her mother hopes for a glittering marriage to a good man, but Marjorie has other ideas. Spending the summer working as a drama coach, she falls desperately in love twice over: with Noel Airman, a musician, as reckless as he is talented; and with a dream to defy her destiny as a Jewish wife and mother and become a star of the stage. Why should she settle with being another Mrs Morgenstern, if she can succeed in the heady world of show business as Marjorie Morningstar?

The Last Jews of Kerala

Edna Fernandes

HB £16.99

Separated by a narrow stretch of swamp-like waters, and distinguished by the colour of their skin, the Black Jews and the White Jews have been locked in a rancorous feud for centuries. Only now, when their combined number has diminished to less than 50 and they are on the threshold of extinction, have the two remaining Jewish communities in south India begun to realise that their destiny, and their undoing, is the same. Living in Cochin alongside this last generation, Edna Fernandes tells their story from the illustrious arrival of their ancestors from the court of King Solomon, through their long heyday of wealth, tolerance and privilege to their present twilit existence, as synagogues crumble into disuse and weddings disappear, leaving only funerals.

The Family Mashber

Der Nister

PB £12.99

At long last back in print.
A protean work: a tale of a divided family and divided souls, a panoramic picture of an Eastern European town, a social satire, a kabbalistic allegory, an innovative fusion of modernist art and traditional storytelling, a tale of weird humour and mounting tragic power, embellished with a host of uncanny and fantastical figures drawn from daily life and the depths of the unconscious. Above all, the book is an account of a world in crisis, torn between the competing claims of family, community, business, politis, the individual conscience, and an elusive God.

The Jews in South Africa

Richard Mendelsohn & Milton Shain

HB £25.00

Spanning the past two centuries, The Jews in South Africa explores the fascinating role played by this small but highly significant community in the economic, political, social and cultural life of this country. This illustrated story - the first comprehensive history to appear in over 50 years - includes a wide range of historically important photographs, many long unseen, and encompasses a broad swathe of Jewish life, from the bimah and the boardroom to the bowling green. Beginning with the first Jewish immigrants to South Africa, and depicting the fragility of the early foundations and the shifting fortunes of this infant community, the title traces its development to robust maturity amidst turbulent social and political currents. These include the strident antisemitism of the 1930s, the moral dilemmas of the apartheid era, the subsequent turbulent transition towards a non-racial democracy, the birth of the New South Africa and the fresh challenges and promise that have followed in its wake up to the present day.Included are such personalities as Barney Barnato, Helen Suzman, Joe Slovo, Sol Kerzner and Rabbi Cyril Harris, as well as many others who have made an important mark in their fields.

Sea of Poppies

Amitav Ghosh

HB £18.99

At the heart of this epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slaving-ship, The Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman. As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races and generations. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of China. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, which makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive -- a masterpiece from one of the world's finest novelists.

My Father's Roses

Nancy Kohner

HB £18.99

Nancy Kohner spent two decades piecing together her familys history from the vast quantity of diaries, letters and photographs that her father brought out of Prague before the Second World War. The result is the extraordinary and touching record of a Jewish family caught up in the tumult of two world wars. Nancys grandparents and their three children find their sanctuary in the garden of the small town where they live between Prague and the German border called Podersam. There they have their happiest times at the reunion when the eldest son returns from the trenches of World War 1, when their youngest son joins them in the family linen business, and when their daughter gives birth to their first grandchild. But instability and danger are the permanent backdrop. When the Nazi Storm Troopers march into Podersam their lives will never be the same again. The daughter commits suicide while the two sons escape to England and Ireland. The last batch of letters from the grandmother make it poignantly clear that her fate is the death camp of Treblinka.

The Discovery of France

Graham Robb

PB £9.99

Illuminating, engrossing and full of surprises, "The Discovery of France" is a literary exploration of a country few will recognize; from maps and migration to magic, language and landscape, it's a book that reveals the 'real' past of France to tell the whole story - and history - of this remarkable nation. 'With gloriously apposite facts and an abundance of quirky anecdotes and thumbnail sketches of people, places and customs, Robb, on brilliant form, takes us on a stunning journey through the historical landscape of France' - "Independent". 'Certain books strain the patience of those close to you .

The Pornographer of Vienna

Lewis Croft

PB £7.99

The son of a railway inspector, Schiele rejects his bourgeois upbringing and flees in pursuit of artistic fulfilment. When he gains admission to the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, it seems that a glittering career lies ahead of him. But Schiele's talent drives him to portray the moral and physical squalor of the Habsburg capital, and he is rejected by an indignant and hypocritical art world. Forced to endure acute poverty and even imprisonment, Schiele continues to pursue his artistic mission, and in the last months of his life finally finds acclaim with those who had shunned him. In a lavish first novel of rare descriptive power and empathy, fuelled by a blend of research and literary imagination, Crofts succeeds in evoking the man as well as the artist. The result is a masterful, at times heartbreaking portrayal of Austria's most decadent and most misunderstood painter, and of the city which both inspired and destroyed him.

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