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Listeners
By Maggie Stiefvater
It’s a quite a leap from island utopias to luxury hotels in wartime Virginia. In The Listeners, Pearl Harbour has just shaken America into the war, and hotel manager June ‘Hoss’ Hudson discovers her premises is to welcome some new guests. Only they’re not welcome at all. The new arrivals to the Avallon Hotel are German, Japanese and Italian diplomats and officials, unable to be dispatched immediately back to Europe but in need of government oversight. Author Maggie Stiefvater doesn’t sugarcoat the sympathies of the Nazi visitors, but she does bring to life the impact on the women and children caught up in the situation, in a mesmerising book based on real events. Meanwhile there’s a disarmingly attractive FBI agent for Hoss to contend with, the hotel heir with whom she has a torrid history, and the mystical, magical Appalachian mountain sweetwater surrounding everything. Unusual and unputdownable.
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The Lost Baker of Vienna
By Sharon Kirtzman
Not far down the road, Sharon Kirtzman’s The Lost Baker of Vienna opens with a North Carolina food writer mourning the loss of her beloved grandfather, a Holocaust survivor about whose experiences she knows far too little. Could a meeting in Vienna with a mysterious confectionery company founder provide both the opportunity Zoe needs to progress her career and the answer to all her questions? The present day chapters grate slightly (Zoe is a recipient of the Carrie Bradshaw school of preposterous journalistic assignments), but the bulk of the action takes place in 1946, when 19-year-old Chana and her younger brother Aron escape from a displaced persons camp to Vienna, in the hope of reaching America. There, Chana meets Mayer Suconick, a Jew like her but one playing a dangerous game running the local black market. Chana is a heroine to root for, and this is an interesting, less frequently explored, moment in Jewish history, based partly on the experiences of the author’s own family.
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The Room on Rue Amelie
By Kristin Harmel
Staying with wartime love stories, The Room on Rue Amelie by Kristin Harmel follows Ruby, an American in Paris as the Nazis occupy the city. Her French husband disappears and Ruby must forge her own life and find a way to survive. A role in the resistance, smuggling Allied pilots to safety, seems to offer purpose, but what risks will it expose her to? And how will she protect her teenage neighbour, a Jewish girl called Charlotte? The prose is a tad melodramatic, the background love story improbable, but the emotional stakes are undeniable, and it keeps you guessing to the end.
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The Protest
By Rob Rinder
Bringing us back to reality, Rob Rinder’s latest legal thriller The Protest focuses on what seems to be an open-and-shut case: a woman who threw arsenic-laced paint on a famous artist at a gallery opening and killed him. But is the protester a pawn; and if so, who is pulling the strings? Rinder’s barrister hero Adam Green, last seen in The Suspect, is back playing sleuth while also dealing with his neurotic Jewish mother, pompous chambers’ colleagues, and debilitating insecurity. Does it all hang together? Possibly not (although it’s not necessarily meant to; another book in the series is imminent). Nonetheless, Green is an adorable mensch, in over his head, and this is a fun romp through London’s art scene.
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I’ll Be Right There
By Amy Bloom
For something completely different, Amy Bloom’s beautifully written I’ll Be Right Here is the story of two Algerian/French/Muslim/Jewish half siblings (it’s less politically correct than it sounds). Opening in pre-war Paris, it follows them intermittently through their lives. Having survived the war as maid to society ladies, Gazala builds a new life in America and finds a manufactured family in the shape of Anne and Alma Cohen. From there come daughters, actual and adopted, husbands and lovers, friendships forged over the decades, and sexual longing (occasionally taboo in nature) in all different directions. Bloom’s restrained style, in which what’s omitted tells you as much as what is included, won’t be for everyone, but it is a vivid portrait of friendship and family amidst the ebbs and flows of life.
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My Sister and Other Lovers
By Esther Freud
Also looking back on a life well-lived or otherwise is Lucy, in My Sister and Other Lovers, the follow-up to Esther Freud’s bestselling fictionalised memoir Hideous Kinky. That book was a thinly veiled account of her and her sister’s peripatetic childhood with their hippy mother. This one steps in when the sisters are in their teens, with Lucy steering us through interconnected stories of adolescences and adult lives steeped in messy or meaningless relationships, addiction, uncertainty and grief. If that sounds miserable, it isn’t: although this isn’t a rose-tinted picture, it’s an intriguing glimpse into glamorous, bohemian London life in the 1980s and 1990s and how youthful experiences shape the adults we become.
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People Pleaser
By Catriona Stewart
Lastly, People Pleaser (Penguin). In the acknowledgments Catriona Stewart thanks her grandmother, a Jewish children’s author, for inspiring her writing career. What Barbara Cohen would have made of her granddaughter’s debut is anyone’s guess, given that it focuses on the sordid fallout of stardom acquired via a Love Island style reality show. We meet Maggie – erstwhile winner of the show, married to her co-star and now a successful influencer – as she is dying, having just been stabbed. But who killed her, and was her life as picture perfect as it seemed? That’s the question her sister, her sister’s roommate, and her TV executive boss (a Lena Dunham-esque hot mess who has cleaned up her act) set out to find out. For a bloody thriller, the real horror comes from the behind-the-scenes glimpse into the ruthlessness of reality TV. Gripping, fun, and perfect sunbed reading.
