Review: Swimming In A Sea Of Death: A Son's Memoir

By David Rieff
Granta, £12.99

‘In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings,” wrote Susan Sontag when receiving chemotherapy for breast cancer 30 years before her death. “Be cheerful, be stoic, be tranquil.” Facing her last illness, Sontag was none of these things, and David Rieff records his complicity with his mother’s denial of the fatality of her condition. Sontag, famous intellectual, critic and writer, could neither imagine a world without her in it, nor summon up any reserves of spiritual strength for that final journey.

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Steve Toltz: A joker who bites back at hacks

We meet Steve Toltz, an Australian novelist set to make a huge impact

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Review: By The Rivers Of Babylon

By Khalid Kishtainy
Quartet Books, £15

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Review: Memories Of Eden

By Violette Shamash (edited by Mira and Tony Rocca)
Forum Books, £14.99

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Review: Last Days Of Babylon

By Marina Benjamin
Bloomsbury, £9.99

In the 1941 Farhud (pogrom), my husband’s mother lost a relative. Ten years later, along with most of the Iraqi Jewish community, the entire family left for Israel (300 of them filled a plane). As they locked the door of their house, Muslim neighbours stood in the street crying and begging them to stay. This is a complex story, very different to the Ashkenazi Jewish experience.

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Review: The Fox, The Foetus And The Fatal Injection

By Rabbi Daniel Levy
YPS, £8

“I have often heard people say that ‘Some rabbis are known as controversial whilst others are not’ … I would prefer to say that there are rabbis who speak out and rabbis who do not.”
(From The Fox, the Foetus and the Fatal Injection)

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Book Week boss accuses Edinburgh event of bias

Jewish Book Week director Geraldine D’Amico has expressed disappointment that the Edinburgh International Book Festival plans to mark Israel’s 60th anniversary by focusing on the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, the Palestinian term for the creation of Israel.

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Review: To This Day

By SY Agnon (trans: Hillel Halkin)
The Toby Press, £14.99

The last novel written by SY Agnon, doyen of Israeli literature and Nobel laureate, is finally available in English

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Review: The Saladin Murders

By Matt Rees
Atlantic, £11.99

Morse, Rebus... and now Yussef,” raved The Observer in its assessment of Matt Rees’s first foray into fiction, The Bethlehem Murders (now available as a £6.99 paperback). I can’t say I agreed with The Observer then, but on the basis of his second novel, The Saladin Murders, Rees’s hero, Omar Yussef, is becoming more and more likeable — even if no better as a detective.

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Review: Beaufort

By Ron Leshem
Harvill Secker, £12.99

For a country so dominated by conflict, Israel has produced remarkably little literature about its wars. Only two major books have been written about the near-defeat of 1973, for example. And Beaufort, Ron Leshem’s powerful book about the retreat from Lebanon in 2000, was rejected by several publishers. He was repeatedly told that the public was not ready to confront this traumatic episode in its recent history.

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