Search results for ""Peter Halban Publishers Ltd""

Nabil al-Amari is an English teacher in Baghdad, in Saddam's Iraq, when a chance encounter with Samara Katchens, an American journalist covering the war, changes his life forever. It is April 2003 and American and British forces have recently invaded Iraq. Samara, or Sam for short, is ambitious, cynical and determined. Nabil is both fascinated and bewildered by her, and he's keen to show her things she doesn't notice in her rush to cover the news. She is pushed by her editor to seek concrete proof for a story concerning payments for false documents - a practice which breaks all journalistic codes of ethics - "as if truth were so hard in that way, like rocks and concrete". In Iraq it is rarely so. As Sam single-mindedly pursues this story, she discovers a chasm between her editor's expectations and the reality she faces in a city torn apart by war and conflicting loyalties. And in her determination to uncover the truth, she takes one gamble too many, endangering herself, Nabil and his family.

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Revealing and enlightening, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin gives a close-up view of one of the foremost thinkers of our timeAn interview with the noted British philosopher and historian of ideas, conducted by the Iranian philosopher Jahanbegloo, which grew into a series of five conversations, comprising an intellectual memoir. They include Berlin's writings on historicism, pluralism and liberty as well as the ideas of thinkers such as Vico, Herder and Herzen. Berlin also speaks of his many friends and acquaintances amongst the important thinkers and artists of the twentieth century.Philosopher and leading proponent of liberal thinking, Isaiah Berlin has changed our sense of history and life. This new edition provides an excellent introduction to Berlin's thought.

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At the beginning of June 1895, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the Paris correspondent of the Austrian Neue Freie Presse, made a momentous decision - he would bring about the creation of a state for the Jews. In his attempt to realise this dream, he became the greatest figure of modern Jewish history and is today seen as the father of the State of Israel.

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This incisive biography traces Rabin's lifelong impact on the shaping of Israel, examining his remarkable dual career - as the soldier who oversaw Israel's greatest military victory, the Six Day War, and the statesman who set it on the road to peace.

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Is Jerusalem the centre of the world or the place where it will end? For the people of this novel set around 1960 in the divided city, it is the end. There is no way out. In front of them lies the border and no man's land; behind lies a nondescript little town and the road they won't take away to normality and the sea. They are a colourful crew: refugees, Jews, Christians, run-away monks, nuns, a restless polyglot kind of family - intellectual, artistic, theatrical - who, by choice or accident, find themselves living at a dead end, near or even right on top of the volatile border that cuts the city in two. The wound is still new and won't heal. So their lives, loves and jealousies are shadowed by the ghosts of the people who, ten years before, abandoned the houses where they now live, and the instability they experience in their lives grows out of this landscape and its history. The Eichmann trial, and preparations for it, pervades the book, as do preparations for an outdoor staging of the medieval mystery play Noah's Flood, adapted and set in contemporary Jerusalem. The play contains a turbulent, quixotic, but also serious warning. The waters could be here any day and who knows how to build an ark?

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Berlin 1927: when an executive at the newly-famous Ufa film studios is found dead in his bath, it falls to Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner, of the Kriminalpolizei to investigate.With the help of the German film director Fritz Lang and the head of the most powerful crime syndicate, Hoffner finds his case reaches deep into Berlin's sex and drug trade, and into the political world of Hitler's Brownshirts (the SA).Caught up in this story is Hoffner's new lover, and his two sons, one of whom works for Joseph Goebbels. We last met Hoffner in Rosa (2007); his relationship with his sons develops menacingly in Shadow and Light.

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These photographs are more than simply a journalistic record of conflict and turmoil. They are the product of a very personal journey in a place full of shattered dreams brought about by an endless conflict which crosses the boundaries of culture and time. It's a place where the young are robbed of their youth and the elderly stripped of their dignity. The people who live here glorify their past, curse the present, and have difficulty imagining a future. Publishing this book for the 60th anniversary serves as a way of explaining the profound sense of frustration and loss felt on both sides of the Israel/ Palestine divide.

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After the mysterious death of one Vatican priest and the disappearance ofanother, Father Ian Pearse, an American working on early Christian textsin the Vatican, comes into possession of a mysterious scroll. Hediscovers ingeniously coded letters and the text of an ancient prayer never before found in written form.These reveal a conspiracy, by a sect long-thought dead, reaching deepinto the present Vatican hierarchy. It becomes a race against a ruthless unknown opponent, which takesFather Pearse from the Vatican, via an ancient Greek monastery, to war-torn Bosnia.

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Madame du Deffand (1696-1780) was a minor French aristocrat who, bored by her marriage, threw herself into scandalous relationships with leading noblemen, including the French Regent. She later re-invented herself as a highly successful salonniere, her salon being frequented by leading thinkers of the day. She also maintained very witty, perceptive correspondences with Voltaire (whose letters back are full expositions of his philosophy) and later with Horace Walpole with whom she fell deeply in love, much to his shock.

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"Taut and illuminating¿ memorable¿ written with the humility of he who confesses himself and with the honesty of he who bore witness." Primo Levi"Luminous, almost light-hearted, autobiography about a family of Italian Jews under Mussolini." Frederic Raphael, Sunday TimesSegre tells the story of his childhood and adolescence in Mussolini's Italy. Nurtured in a world of aristocratic privilege, he emerged naive and unprepared for the realities that awaited him. The crash of 1929 and the introduction of Mussolini's anti-Jewish laws saw him on the boat to Tel Aviv, a rare immigrant with a first-class ticket, jacket, silk tie and detachable linen collar, thrust into the pioneering culture of Palestine in the 1930s. Segre explores the pathos and contradictions of such situations with a keen sense of irony which lifts the book out of the world of memoirs and into the realm of literature.

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In London a couple meet at a party. She is Israeli and he Palestinian. Both are here to escape the politics of their countries and both want to be alone.Despite that, their relationship develops and inevitably they have to confront the politics that, in principle, separates them.Can their relationship survive?A clever, well-paced novel.

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Since his first public appearance in the late 1590s, Shylock has been synonymous with antisemitism. Many of his bon mots remain common currency among Jew-haters; among them "3000 ducats" and the immortal "pound of flesh". But Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, was incapable of inventing anyone so uninteresting; instead he affords Shylock such ambiguity that some of his other lines have become keynotes for believers in shared humanity and tolerance. Following Shakespeare's example these stories - all inspired by The Merchant of Venice - range from the comic to the melancholic. Many pivot on significant productions of the play: Stockholm in 1944, London in 2012, and Venice in 2016. Some are concerned with domestic matters, others with the political, including one - more outrageous than the others - that links Shylock via Israel with the American presidency; most combine both. Running through these linked stories - of which there are seven, like the ages of man - is the cycle of family life, with all its comedy and tragedy.

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Yogev Ben-Ari has been sent to St Petersburg by the Mossad - ostensibly to set up business links. His life is solitary, ordered and lonely, until he meets Anna. Neither is quite what they seem to be, but there is no doubt about the love they feel for each other.This encounter is definitely not part of the Mossad plan and they hatch a dark scheme to drive the two apart. Ben-Ari has no time to discover the truth about Anna's real identity before the Mossad resolves the issue for him. But still Ben-Ari doesn't give up, determined to learn the truth about their love.Amid the shadowy manipulations of the secret services, Mishka Ben-David depicts the world of a Mossad agent who chooses, against all odds, to fight for his right to be with the woman he loves.

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Clive Sinclair's first collection of stories won the Somerset Maugham Award.His second was short-listed for the inaugural Dylan Thomas Award.His third won both the PEN Silver Pen, and the Jewish Quarterly Award for fiction.This is his fourth.The new stories range from New Orleans and Texas to Peru and Venice.Their subjects are loss, the fear of loss, and love, most especially that between husbands and wives, fathers and sons.Their cast includes the quick and the dead, the real and the imagined: Davy Crockett, Kinky Friedman, Captain Haddock, Princess Diana, and Shylock.They are as cruel as life, and as funny.

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An ageing film director named Yair Moses has been invited to the Spanish pilgrim city of Santiago de Campostela for a retrospective of his early work. As he and Ruth, his leading actress and longtime muse, settle into their hotel, Moses notices the painting over his bed depicting a classical legend of an old prisoner nursing at the breast of a young woman. For the first time in decades, he recalls the infamous scene from one of his early films which led to his estrangement from his difficult but brilliant screenwriter, Trigano, who was also Ruth's former lover.Throughout the retrospective, Moses is unsettled, straddling the past and the present, and upon his return to Israel, he decides to find the elusive Trigano and propose a new collaboration. But the screenwriter demands a price for such a reconciliation, one that will have strange and lasting consequences.Searching, intellectual, and original, The Retrospective is a probing meditation on mortality, the limits of memory, and the struggle of artistic creation by one of the world's most esteemed writers.

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Anne Frank is known worldwide for her moving and powerful Diary written whilst hiding from the Nazis. Less well known are these stories, fables, personal reminiscences and an unfinished novel - now re-issued after being out of print for many years. Her humour, unflinching honesty and her wisdom - all evident in The Diary of Anne Frank - are equally present in these Tales, rendering it an essential part of her legacy.

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Yehuda Kaminka, a retired teacher, returns to Israel from the U.S. to divorce his estranged wife who is in a mental asylum, having tried to kill him a few years earlier. The impending divorce of their parents throws into turmoil the lives of the couple's three children and grandson, revealing the complexity of their relationships. Yehuda's nine days, leading up to Passover, are remembered by different members of the family: A.B. Yehoshua's brilliance reveals itself in these different voices, each a minor masterpiece.A picture slowly emerges of what happened as memories are revived, hopes expressed and dreams articulated. The narrative gathers pace as Yehuda's visit draws to an end and he changes his mind about the divorce agreement.

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Professor Yohanan Rivlin has two obsessions, the first and most ambitious, is to understand the Arab mind - no mean feat in itself though perhaps made easier by the fact that he lives and works with Israeli Arabs. The second - and more personal, though equally hard to grasp - is to understand the failure of his elder son's marriage. Rivlin's two quests lead him to extraordinary - and at times highly entertaining - encounters with very disparate people, where the personal becomes intertwined with the political, as he searches out the truth both in politics and life.

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Naomi Shepherd is a prize-winning historian and biographer; here she turns her hand to fiction, revealing a razor-sharp eye, a finely attuned ear, and a keen sense of cultural dissonance. In each of these thirteen stories we see a different facet of a fast-changing country where the clash of cultures and of expectations creates situations rich in humour, poignancy, disappointment, and tragedy.

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In 1857 the Gunzburgs arrived in Paris from Russia with their large family, a retinue of business staff and extensive domestic help: personal assistants, secretaries, tutors, wet-nurses and nannies, coachmen, ladies' companions, valets and maids, and even a kosher cook. For the Gunzburgs were practising Jews who observed every religious law whilst also launching themselves into Parisian high society. Napoleon III was on a mission to modernise France and the Gunzburgs were quick to avail themselves of opportunities that were opening up - particularly in banking.The family fortunes prospered through hard work, foresight and marriage. Soon the family was playing a leading role in the Jewish communities of both Russia and France, alongside their contemporaries or relatives the Ephrussis, the Rothschilds, the Brodskys, the Camondos and the Sassoons.The family lived through the tumultuous events of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, and when family tragedy struck later, they returned the family base to Russia. They witnessed the Russian pogroms and revolution of 1905. Their sons fought in the armies of three countries in the First World War, only to go into exile as revolution gripped Russia in 1917-18. The outbreak of the Second World War saw some of the family once again on the road as refugees.Lorraine de Meaux discovers lost archives, letters and pictures, as she brings together distant family members in her story of the Gunzburgs.

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When a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv violently disrupts his life, Mickey Simhoni abandons his plans to become an artist and instead allows himself to be recruited into the Mossad. Slowly, he learns the art of spycraft the and painstaking process of building a cover, becoming someone else whom he resembles, who is presumed dead.His cover story takes him to Toronto where he meets and earlier flame -- Niki, a girl he had hooked up with in Tokyo a decade earlier. Mickey is torn between loyalty to the Mossad and his intense feelings for Niki -- which the ever-resourceful Niki partially resolves with an unusual decision.But still Mickey's dilemma persists, as he oscillates between duty and love, his complex operations in the Mossad threatening to kill their love. When his final operation in Algiers goes badly wrong, the rage and hatred engendered, and the utter humiliation visited on then, leads to a traumatic conclusion.

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After 17 years, the narrator and his friend, Ali, meet at Heathrow andslowly remember their past in a Palestinian camp in Lebanon. Their memories are concentrated on one fatal night when they were with two other friends for the last time, before tragedy struck. But for the narrator, a personal tragedy had occurred much earlier¿Like many other Palestinians, both Ali and the narrator had to leave Lebanon in the mid-1980s, when it became a battleground for local armies - Ali to America, the narrator to London.But this is not just a story about suffering, it is also about absurd politicsand violence - about a world where tragedy and comedy co-exist. A poignant story that lingers long after one has finished it.

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In the autumn, Molkho's wife dies. His years of loving care have ended and his newfound freedom proves unlike the one he had imagined. It is uneasy, filled with the erotic fantasies of a man who must fall in love, but whose longing for meaningful relationships is held hostage by the spirit of his wife.Winter sees him in Berlin in a comic encounter with a legal adviser from his office in Haifa. Spring takes him to the Galilee and an impossible infatuation. Jerusalem in the summer brings another man's wife and an extraordinary request. And the following autumn there is Nina whose yearning for her Russian home brings Molkho back to life.'In this finely observed and oddly moving comic novel¿Yehoshua makes us feel [Molkho's] humanity - and deftly wins him our sympathy.' Kirkus

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Lina is trying to lead a normal girl's life in Baghdad, but being Jewish in an Arab country is not easy as politics keep intruding. Violent government coups are almost annual events and it's difficult for a child to understand what's going on or who to believe.The need for secrecy means Lina cannot tell her best friend that her family is just waiting for the right moment to flee. It is the 1960s and Lina is part of the dwindling Jewish community

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It has long been rumoured that a sixteenth-century monk called Eisenreich out-Machiavellied Machiavelli, writing a masterplan for the Church to achieve world domination. So dangerous was the text that the Pope had to kill Eisenreich to suppress it. But when the bullet-riddled body of a young girl is found in the mid-West and "Eisenreich" is her dying word, it becomes terrifyingly clear that not only is the document real, but someone is planning to use it.Sarah Trent, a US agent, and Xander Jaspers, a Columbia University professor, race to find this manuscript, but neither fully understand the danger they're confronting as it has fallen into the hands of a cabal who intend to use it to rip society apart, and create a new world order.Trent and Jaspers make a quirky, entertaining team and the brilliant story line turns The Overseer into one of the best political thrillers of the decade.'Dazzling plot twists, highly sophisticated and diverting thriller, superior entertainment.' Washington Post Book World

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These journals provide great insight into the mind and art of one of the great 20th century artists. Though born in Poland, he is best known for his paintings of Welsh miners, for it was workers that inspired him, and he painted them with great simplicity, almost as monuments to work, and often with the sun and sky behind them so that they looked like latter-day saints. The journals reveal his artistic heritage, who inspired him, what he was in painters, what he thought of their technique. This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in art.

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Brings together all the novellas and short stories including two sories not previously published in English.

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Sailing from the North African port of Tangier to a small, distant town called Paris are a Jewish merchant, Ben Attar, his two beloved wives and his Arab partner, Abu Lutfi. They have come for a meeting with their third partner the widower, Raphael Abulafia who has been forced to turn his back on their previous trading partnership because of his new wife's distrust of the dual marriage of Ben Attar. The latter turns this annual trading voyage into a personal quest to legitimise his second wife, restore his honour, and, equally important, to show others the richness and humanity in his way of life.A.B. Yehoshua has imaginatively recreated a medieval world (from North Africa to Paris, from Spain to Germany) with its merchant trade in great depth and sensuous detail. His evocation of one man's love is lyrical, erotic even.

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A husband seeks his wife's lover who is lost in the turbulence of Israel's Yom Kippur War. As the story of his quest unfolds and grows in intensity, the main protagonists are drawn into the search and are transformed by it: through the different perspectives of husband, wife, teenage daughter, and young Arab emerges a complex picture of the uneasy present, the tension between generations, between Israel's past and future, between Jews and Arabs. 'We see an Arab and an Israeli locked into a debate of proximity, alikeness, mental hatred, that Yehoshua's superb ability to render both presences relieves of all sentimentality. What I value most in The Lover is a gift for equidistance - between characters, even between the feelings on both sides.'Alfred Kazin, New York Review of Books

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Six women and one man gather in a community centre in North London for a life writing class run by Dorothy, their uniquely unqualified teacher. They have urgent stories to tell and, as they recount them, they discover they are connected in unexpected ways.There is Iris, eighty years old but still with a taste for younger men; Pearl single-handedly bringing up her grandson, enigmatic hooded Kai; elusive Renee; Sabine whose happy Belgian childhood may not have been as happy as it sounds; mixed-up Esther; Edgar whose winning ways charm them all and of course there is Enid, the retired art teacher, who insists on telling her story in pictures not words.Illustrated with sharp line drawings by illustrator Beatrice Baumgartner-Cohen, The Brondesbury Tapestry is a quirky, perceptive look at a group of people who feel the modern world has left them behind but who have decided that they will still have the last word.

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An experiment is under way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: a woman, recently widowed, is starting a trial period in assisted living, mainly to placate her over-anxious son, whilst in Jerusalem her daughter Noga, a young harpist, returns from her job with a Dutch orchestra to look after the family apartment.To enliven her stay, Noga's brother finds work for her - playing roles as an extra in film, TV, and in the opera Carmen. The random roles Noga is thrust into resonate strangely with her own life which she begins to re-evaluate. Central to her past is the fact that she refused to have children, resulting in the break-up of her marriage. No-one in her family understood her motives for not wanting children and everyone has a different explanation for it. Now, a chance encounter with her former husband reveals his continuing powerful, love as well as a shocking deed she committed during their marriage. But Noga is a free spirit neither tied to the past nor defined by it, and always keen to push boundaries. She lives for her music and is willing to go wherever it takes her. The three-month experiment proves as much of a test for her as for her mother and both are radically transformed by the end.A.B. Yehoshua is as creative, humorous and provocative as ever in The Extra, exploring themes familiar to him of love, family relationships and artistic ambitions, set mainly in an ever-changing Jerusalem.

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When Sylvia Garland returns to England, after the death of her husband and half a lifetime lived abroad, the last thing she expects is to find love again. But when her daughter-in-law Smita announces she is pregnant, and despite her own poor track record as a mother, she finds herself caught up in the excitement.Before Sylvia knows it, she is 65 years old and head over heels in love - with her grandson.Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart is a touching, witty look at family ties across the generations and the plight of grandparents when their children's relationships break down.

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Expelled Mossad agent, Ronen, has disappeared following a failed assassination attempt on the life of the Hezbollah operative responsible for suicide bombings in Israel. Feared to be on an unauthorized mission that will bring catastrophe to his country, Ronen must be found and his former commander, Gadi, takes it upon himself to track him down. The resulting physical and intellectual scuffle between the two men becomes one of deeper, moral inquiry.'... high stakes, and the brutal complexity and fear of today's fragmented Middle East ... Ben-David delivers spy thrillers with all the authenticity and inside knowledge of an ex-Mossad agent' Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of JERUSALEM: THE BIOGRAPHY

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Jerusalem 1967: Everyone is reeling from the aftermath of the 6-Day War. The Palestinians are stunned and cannot comprehend their losses, whilst the Israelis are waking up to a new political reality - and their new responsibilities.Surprisingly for someone so young, Nuri Imari (whose family we encountered in The Dove Flyer) is appointed advisor on Arab affairs for the Israeli government. With little guidance, he is asked to help restore relations with their Palestinian neighbours and to restore some sort of normality to their life.He discovers a world he did not know, with complexities and loyalties he could never have imagined. He tries to steer a humane course but soon finds himself confronting bigotry and hatred on both sides.And then he meets Yasmine, a Palestinian woman recently returned from Paris¿

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On the Eve of Hitler's Olympics, Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner is forced out of the Kriminalpolizei because he is a half Jew. Hoffner is not surprised given the rise of Nazism, and anyway his focus is elsewhere. His son Georg is missing in Spain, swept up in the sudden outbreak of the civil war. He has already lost Sascha, his elder son, to the Nazi regime. But Georg is not what he appears to be, and when Hoffner discovers this, he is determined to save the one son he can.The Second Son is the final installment in Jonathan Rabb's Berlin trilogy, set between the two world wars. Now, nearly ten years after the events of Shadow and Light, Hoffner finds himself tossed into the chaos that is Spain - where he quickly meets anarchists, Soviet and British secret agents, and a female doctor called Mila Pera - as he follows a trail of clues left by Georg.Rabb delivers another brilliant atmospheric work.On Rosa: "a ghostly noir that could have been conspired at by Raymond Chandler and Andre Malraux." Harper'sOn Shadow and Light (2009), "brilliantly plotted narrative." Washington Post

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A husband and wife spend a week apart over the Hanukkah holiday: Daniela visits her widowed brother-in-law in Africa to revive memories of her sister with him but, in ways she cannot begin to understand, he has been left wounded and raging after an earlier tragedy - a death by friendly fire. Her husband, Amotz Ya'ari, stays behind in Israel, rushing between his engineering company, their grandchildren and his father. Life in the Ya'ari family is full, complicated and humorous, but beyond it lies a fragile society deeply uneasy with itself and badly scarred, with each family harbouring its own ghosts.Ever-creative, A.B. Yehoshua's short, interwoven chapters create a duet-like narrative which penetrates deeply into human relationships and taps into the psyche of his country.

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Alone in his room in a London madrasah, Musah tries on an abaya, a hijab and a shawl: he has crossed over - to outsiders he has become a Muslim woman. In a Pakistani haveli, his cousin, the nubile Iram, waits to fulfil the will of Dadaji, their grandfather. She and Musa must marry. When Musa's siblings and friends step in to help him fight tradition and achieve what he wants - a love match - their efforts lead to outrage, hilarity and, ultimately, tragedy.

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In November 1918, socialist revolution sweeps across Germany, transforming Berlin, already ravaged by war, into a political battleground. Four women from the slums are discovered dead, all with identical markings on their back. When the fifth turns out to be Rosa Luxemburg, a leader of the suppressed socialist uprising, the political police complicate the investigations of Detective Inspector Nicolai Hoffner and his assistant Hans Fichte.Rabb brings to life a world capital on the brink of chaos, a tragic revolutionary who inspired and enraged in equal measure, and a compellingly complex, world-weary, deeply flawed but brilliant inspector, Nikolai Hoffner."...a novel so richly drawn, so dark and so compelling it reaches into your gut and holds on tight..." Detroit Free Press "a ghostly noir that could have been conspired at by Raymond Chandler and Andre Malraux." Harper's"Rabb wields a deft and chilling pen." Richmond Times Dispatch"The hallmarks of Jonathan Rabb's writing are impeccable research, extraordinary attention to detail, superb style and a deep respect for his readers."Charles Middleburgh, Amazon.co.uk

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Six generations of the Sephardi Mani family are chronicled in thisprofound and passionate Mediterranean epic, which moves backwardsfrom the 1980s to the mid-nineteenth century. The story comprises of five conversations, each centering on the fate of adifferent member of the Mani family, and in each the responses of oneperson are absent.Mr. Mani is surprisingly humorous, full of extraordinary historicalperspectives, and deeply wise and compassionate. It is an imaginativetour-de-force.

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Shalvi has been a pioneer in advancing the status of women in Israel and in religious girls' education. She has been an active participant in peace dialogues and inter-religious initiatives and has been a social activist all her life.Born in Germany in 1926 to Orthodox parents, Shalvi grew up in London and studied English at Cambridge, before moving to Jerusalem in 1949 where she went on to pursue a PhD at Hebrew University, eventually teaching English Literature.In 1950, Shalvi met and married her husband, Moshe Shelkowitz (later Shalvi), who died in 2013. They had six children together.One of Shalvi's greatest accomplishments was the establishment of the Pelech School which she headed from 1975 to 1990. This experimental/ progressive religious high school for girls in Jerusalem has become a model for women's Orthodox education across the country.Shalvi was a co-founder of the Israel Women's Network, established to advance the status of women.In 2007 she was awarded the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievements in the areas of education, social welfare and human rights.

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This is the story of Sasha Abramsky's grandparents, Chimen and Miriam Abramsky, and of their unique home at 5 Hillway, around the corner from Hampstead Heath.In their semi-detached house, so deceptively ordinary from the outside, the Abramskys created a remarkable House of Books. It became the repository for Chimen's collection of thousands upon thousands of books, manuscripts and other printed, handwritten and painted documents, representing his journey through the great political, philosophical, religious and ethical debates that have shaped the western world.Chimen Abramsky was barely a teenager when his father, a famous rabbi, was arrested by Stalin's secret police and sentenced to five years hard labour in Siberia, and fifteen when his family was exiled to London. Lacking a university degree, he nevertheless became a polymath, always obsessed with collecting ideas, with capturing the meanderings of the human soul through the world of great thoughts and thinkers. Rejecting his father's Orthodoxy, he became a Communist, made his living as a book-dealer and amassed a huge, and astonishingly rare, library of socialist literature and memorabilia. Disillusioned with Communism and belatedly recognising the barbarity at the core of Stalin's project, he transformed himself once more, this time into a liberal and a humanist. To his socialist library was added a vast trove of Jewish history volumes. Chimen ended his career as Professor of Hebrew and Jewish studies at UCL, London and rare manuscripts expert for Sotheby's.With his wife Miriam, Chimen made their house a focal point for left-wing intellectual Jewish life: hundreds of the world's leading thinkers, from Isaiah Berlin to Eric Hobsbawm, dined at their table. The House of Twenty Thousand Books brings alive this latter-day salon by telling the story of Chimen Abramsky's love affair with ideas and with the world of books and of Miriam's obsession with being a hostess and with entertaining. Room by room, book by book, idea by idea, the world of these politically engaged intellectuals, autodidacts and dreamers is lovingly resurrected.In this extraordinary elegy to a lost world, Sasha Abramsky's passionate narrative brings to life once more not just the Hillway salon, but the ideas, the conflicts, the personalities and the human yearnings that animated it.

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A suicide bomb explodes in a Jerusalem market. One of the victims is a migrant worker without any papers, only a salary slip from the bakery where she worked as a night cleaner. As her body lies unclaimed in the morgue, her employers are labelled unfeeling and inhuman by a local journalist. The manager of human resources is given the task of discovering who she was and why she had come to Jerusalem.As the image of this once-beautiful dead woman begins to obsess him, the manager turns this duty into a personal mission - he is no longer just saving his company's reputation by trying to discover her identity and assure her of a dignified funeral. He is now restoring her not only to her family and country but also to common humanity - whilst at the same time conquering the hardness of his own heart."There are human riches here. The manager moves from a man who has given up on love to one who opens himself to it. And there are strange and powerful scenes - of the morgue, of the coffin, of the Soviet base where the manager passes through the purging of body and soul."Carole Angier, The Independent

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