The Family Orchard (Vintage International)

With the sweep of an epic and the intimacy of a deeply personal tale, The Family Orchard captures six generations of love affairs, legends and family secrets beginning in early nineteenth century Jerusalem and stretching to the present. Peopled with enchanting characters — Esther, the family matriarch who follows the smell of rising bread into the arms of the baker who will become her lover; the twins, Zohar and Moshe, who run the walls of the Old City with their beloved grandfather; Miriam, whose intoxicating beauty inadvertently transforms a house of study into a place of pure carnal frustration — and enveloped by a sense of mysticism and wonder, The Family Orchard is a strikingly original novel; a rich tapestry of Jewish life filled with reverence for family, history, and the natural world around us.

Preformed by Polly Draper and Fritz Weaver

Nomi Eve's lavishly imagined account begins in Palestine in 1837, with the tale of the irrepressible family matriach, Esther, who was lured by the smell of baking bread into an affair with the local baker. Esther passes on her passionate nature to her son, Eliezer, whose love for the forbidden Golda threatened to tear the family apart. And to her granddaughter, Avra the thief, a tiny wisp of a girl who thumbed her nose at her elders by swiping precious stones from the local bazaar-and grew to marry a man she met at the scene of a crime. At once epic and intimate, The Family Orchard is a rich historical tapestry of passion and tradition from a storyteller of beguiling power.