Synopses & Reviews
“A taut, visceral account of a young Jewish boy’s African life . . . offering at times page-turning thrills and at others a painful meditation on destiny and volition.” — NPR,
All Things Considered A powerful family saga, The Lion Seeker is a thrilling ride through the life of Isaac Helger, from redheaded hooligan on the streets of Johannesburg to striving young man on the make. Growing up in the shadow of World War II, Isaac is caught between his mother’s urgent ambition to bring her sisters to safety out of the old world and his own desire for the freedoms of the new. But soon his mother’s carefully guarded secret takes them to the diamond mines, where mysteries are unveiled in the desert rocks and Isaac begins to learn the bittersweet reality of success bought at truly any cost.
“[A] master storyteller . . . Bonert’s zest for description, his attention to social nuances, and his eagerness to tell a large story in a large way . . . [creates] a big, richly detailed novel.” — Tablet Magazine
“Raw and ambitious.” — Moment
“Astonishingly mature, admirably incautious . . . It’s visually and thematically sweeping, rich with diverse personalities, packed with tender waves and roiling crests of love, loss, hope, hatred.” — National Post (Canada)
“Stunning.” — Jewish Daily Forward
“Powerful and thoroughly engrossing . . . To read it is to be reminded how great a great novel can be.” — David Bezmozgis, author of The Free World
Review
"A taut, visceral account of a young Jewish boy's African life… offering at times page-turning thrills and at others a painful meditation on destiny and volition."
—NPR, All Things Considered
"[A] master storyteller... Bonert's zest for description, his attention to social nuances, and his eagerness to tell a large story in a large way... [creates] a big, richly detailed novel."
—Tablet Magazine
"[A] suspenseful, entertaining, and thought provoking epic. . . Recommended to Jewish and philo-Semitic readers who enjoy family sagas, coming of age tales, long epic novels, and learning about a Jewish community with whom they might not be well acquainted."
—New York Journal of Books
"Simply a stunning piece of work. . . If The Lion Seeker wasn't the best Jewish novel I'd read in 2013, it was damn close."
—Jewish Daily Forward
"What a rare and splendid achievement this novel is—emotionally gripping, intellectually challenging, deftly plotted, skillfully composed, and vibrantly alive with the images and sounds and textures and human flurry of another time and place. I was dazzled. And I was moved."
—Tim OBrien
"[Isaac's] is a story of fighting and deciding what's worth fighting for, of cultivating a strength that doesn't erase empathy. . . The pages turn quickly, with suspenseful prose and colorful vernacular dialogue that could easily be used in a blockbuster film."
—Publishers Weekly
"[The Lion Seeker] will grab readers everywhere with the story of the struggling refugees in a new country, the horror they escaped from, and the guilt about those left behind, with secrets not revealed until the very end. . . The immigrant family struggle comes across as universal, whether concerning radicals or the ultra-Orthodox. . . A great choice for book-group discussion."
—Booklist
"South African-born Canadian writer Bonert serves up a latter-day Exodus in this debut novel."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Raw and ambitious. . . The compulsive energy and passion of [Bonert's] prose is well matched to the feverish longings of his deeply flawed protagonist, and the book gains speed and urgency as it steams along."
—Moment Magazine
"Here is the South African novel I've been waiting for. Kenneth Bonert tells it true, not safe. His protagonist is worthy of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and the South Africa he gives us vivid, raw, dangerous, shot through with moral complexity."
—Lynn Freed, author of House of Women and The Servants' Quarters
"The Lion Seeker is a powerful and thoroughly engrossing novel, grand in scope, richly imagined, full of dramatic incident, and crafted in a prose that is by turns roughhewn and lyrical. To read it is to be reminded how great a great novel can be."
—David Bezmozgis, author of The Free World and Natasha: And Other Stories
"A remarkably assured debut, The Lion Seeker is a riveting, lyrical, and profound journey towards the intersection of private lives and public destinies. Kenneth Bonert has all the makings of a major novelist."
—Charles Foran, author of Mordecai: The Life and Times
"The Lion Seeker is no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle-fight raw. A historical novel that feels desperately current; a Rosenburg and Juliet love story shorn of all sentiment; a stock-taking of human brutality and its flip side, our capacity to reach beyond our limitations and be better, all rendered in prose so expert, so fine honed that it belies the adjective ‘debut. It joins classics like J.M. Coetzees Disgrace and Rian Malans My Traitors Heart in the canon, and renders the South African experience universal. A first-round knock-out for Kenneth Bonert."
—Richard Poplak, author of Ja No Man: Growing Up White in Apartheid-Era South Africa
"This powerful novel begins with a mystery that propels its characters through their difficult lives in prewar South Africa and haunts their actions until a dramatic and searing climax based on the Holocaust in Lithuania. The Lion Seeker is vivid and illuminating, astonishing in its range and toughness, and simultaneously an expression of love and regret for all that has been lost."
—Antanas Sileika, author of Underground and Woman in Bronze and Director of the Humber School for Writers
Praise from abroad for The Lion Seeker:
"An emotional tour de force that plumbs the depths of human hope, fear, guilt, and rage, and bears all the hallmarks of a masterwork."
—Ballast (Canada)
"A titanic novel. . . An epic, a vast story about a rarefied subject: the community of Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated to South Africa before World War II. . . Mazel tov, Kenneth Bonert, you have written a blockbuster of a book."
—Toronto Star (Canada)
"Bonert's prose is sharp and masterful, clipping along at a breathless pace while still managing to wow us with imagery, clever turns of phrase and believable dialogue peppered with several languages."
—Globe and Mail (Canada)
"The Lion Seeker is astonishingly mature, admirably incautious. It moves with the sleight-of-hand of the born artist, ramping up for naked tugs at the heart. . . It's visually and thematically sweeping, rich with diverse personalities, packed with tender waves and roiling crests of love, loss, hope, hatred. It casts its bit players (even a final-act dog) as deftly as its stars. . . This novel, quite apart from what it might become, remains completely and thrillingly itself."
—National Post (Canada)
"If not for the setting-South Africa in the 1930s and '40s-the novel's hapless protagonist could have been plucked from the doom-laden pages of Thomas Hardy. . . The Lion Seeker, like its 19th-century literary forebears, is larded with enough plot twists, reversals of fortune, and revelations of family secrets to keep many readers engrossed."
—Quill & Quire (Canada)
Review
"The Servant's Quarters is Lynn Freed's best novel yet. Cressida, a young girl who watches those around her patch up their wounds from the war and carry on with the weight of pretense, is as observant and as wickedly truthful as any Jane Austen character." --Amy Tan
"Freed is a beautiful writer, dead-on brilliant, rich in humor, possessing a dark and comforting wisdom." -- Anne Lamott
Review
PRAISE FOR THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALISTElegant and chilling . . . his tale [has] an Arabian Nightsstyle urgency: the end of the story may mean the death of the teller.”The New York Times Book Review
Slender, smart, and subversive.”Entertainment Weekly
Changezs voice is extraordinary. Cultivated, restrained, yet also barbed and passionate, it evokes the power of butler Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguros The Remains of the Day.”The Seattle Times
A searing and powerful account of a Pakistani in New York after 9/11.”Mira Nair, director of The Namesake
Review
PRAISE FOR
GOLDEN COUNTRY"The novel's heart beats with the pulse of human intersections and the missed connections of its well-drawn characters."--People
"A sumptuous valentine to the twentieth-century Jewish-American experience . . . Like E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Golden Country is a paean to the recent past, but Gilmore's novel concerns itself less with the making of America than with the making of Americans."--BookForum
Review
"A mesmerizing, mythic saga...”—New York Times
“In his luminous and wrenching tale of four motherless brothers, Machart skillfully evokes the rural Texas landscape...”—Entertainment Weekly
“Bruce Machart has penned a dazzling, gratifying tale of retribution, redemption and morality.”—San Antonio Express News
“This is pure literature; an emphasis on language over plot; risky, complex and often unlikable characters and that echo, that ripple that flows forward into the future and backward into myth.”—Los Angeles Times
“Such evocative prose helps make Machart's novel a standout this year, in any genre.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Machart writes fine idiomatic dialogue and unwinds textured details of farm life, horse racing, and the vagaries of the weather.”—Houston Chronicle
“The big state of Texas is home to many good writers, and the arrival of Bruce Machart's debut novel shows there's always room for one more.”—Dallas Morning News
"Machart's prose is so evocative that you can smell the men's cheap tobacco and corn mash, feel the bare, hard-packed earth from which they coax crops. Their dialogue, rural south Texas vernacular, is spare, gnarled and often funny. In addition to the violence, betrayals and cruelty of an old-fashioned western, The Wake of Forgiveness also finds redemption ..."--Wall Street Journal
"This intense, fast-paced debut novel is hard to put down. Machart's hard-hitting style is sure to capture fans of Cormac McCarthy and Jim Harrison. We can only hope for more exceptional fiction from this very talented writer. Enthusiastically recommended."--STARRED, LIBRARY JOURNAL
"... [an] accomplished debut ... Machart's moving story unfolds lyrically and sensually, with little fanfare, as his thoughtful prose propels a character-driven story about family, morality, and redemption."--STARRED, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The Wake of Forgiveness impressed me on many levels. The prose is polished and evocative, the physicality of rural Texas in the year 1910 shimmers with loving exactitude, and the story of Karel Skala is a gripping American drama of misplaced guilt, familial struggle, and a search for identity. At the heart of this remarkable novel is a question that is both age-old and completely modern: Who am I? What a fine, rich, absorbing book." -- Tim O'Brien "If Evan S. Connell, William Faulkner, and Norman Maclean had been born as one person, he might possess the extraordinary gifts of Bruce Machart. The Wake of Forgiveness is a wild, God-forsaken cry delivered in language so lush we cannot stop listening. The dazzling velocity of Macharts prose bears a tale redemptive and resonant as myth, insistent and intimate as breath in the body. With fierce grace and uncompromising passion, this visionary young writer offers the reader the mercy of his own heart and the capaciousness of mind that makes it possible to love the lost without fear or judgment." --Melanie Rae Thon "In his richly told novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, Bruce Machart tells a story of fathers and sons that stretches wide across the Texas landscape, leaving behind its own beautiful wake of remembrance , inheritance, and the unbreakable bonds of family."--Hannah Tinti
Synopsis
In the tradition of the great immigrant sagas, The Lion Seeker brings us Isaac Helger, son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, surviving the streets of Johannesburg in the shadow of World War II
Synopsis
-A taut, visceral account of a young Jewish boy's African life . . . offering at times page-turning thrills and at others a painful meditation on destiny and volition.- -- NPR, All Things Considered
A powerful family saga, The Lion Seeker is a thrilling ride through the life of Isaac Helger, from redheaded hooligan on the streets of Johannesburg to striving young man on the make. Growing up in the shadow of World War II, Isaac is caught between his mother's urgent ambition to bring her sisters to safety out of the old world and his own desire for the freedoms of the new. But soon his mother's carefully guarded secret takes them to the diamond mines, where mysteries are unveiled in the desert rocks and Isaac begins to learn the bittersweet reality of success bought at truly any cost.
- A] master storyteller . . . Bonert's zest for description, his attention to social nuances, and his eagerness to tell a large story in a large way . . . creates] a big, richly detailed novel.- -- Tablet Magazine
-Raw and ambitious.- -- Moment
-Astonishingly mature, admirably incautious . . . It's visually and thematically sweeping, rich with diverse personalities, packed with tender waves and roiling crests of love, loss, hope, hatred.- -- National Post (Canada)
-Stunning.- -- Jewish Daily Forward
-Powerful and thoroughly engrossing . . . To read it is to be reminded how great a great novel can be.- -- David Bezmozgis, author of The Free World
Synopsis
National Jewish Book Award Winner: A family saga set in WWII-era South Africa offering both "page-turning thrills and] a painful meditation on destiny" (NPR, All Things Considered).
Called "a latter-day Exodus" by Kirkus Reviews, The Lion Seeker is an epic historical novel centered on the life of Isaac Helger. The son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, he runs around the streets of Johannesburg as a young hooligan and dreams of getting rich. But his parents are still haunted by the memories of the anti-Semitic pogroms they escaped, even as Isaac secretly pursues a relationship with a gentile girl.
As the Nazi threat rises, Isaac is caught between his mother's urgent ambition to bring her sisters to safety out of the old world, and his own desire to enjoy the freedoms of the new. But soon his mother's carefully guarded secret takes them to the diamond mines, where mysteries are unveiled in the desert rocks and Isaac begins to learn the bittersweet reality of success bought at any cost.
Synopsis
A powerful South African saga — reminiscent of Leon Uris and Nadine Gordimer —
The Lion Seeker is a thrilling ride through the life of Isaac Helger, from redheaded hooligan to striving young man on the make, under the shadow of World War II.
Following his familys emigration from a village in Lithuania to Johannesburgs impoverished Jewish quarter, Isaac struggles to buy his mother a house in the suburbs. But his fortune seeking soon leads him into a feud with a fascist Afrikaner who undermines him in the auto shop where Isaac has found the only work that ever felt true. Even as he loses his heart to a wealthy Parktown girl, his mothers carefully guarded secret takes them to the diamond mines, where mysteries are unveiled in the desert rocks and Isaac begins to learn the bittersweet reality of success bought at any cost.
Synopsis
Haunted by phantoms of World War II and the Holocaust, young Cressida lives in terror of George Harding, who, severely disfigured, has returned from the front to recover on his familys African estate. When Harding plucks young Cressidas beautiful mother and family from financial ruin, establishing them in the old servants quarters, Cressida is swept into a life inexorably bound to his.
In her new setting, she is conscripted to enliven Hardings nephew, the hopelessly timid Edgar, to make him wild and daring.” She takes on this task with resentful fury, leading the boy astray and, in the process, learning to manipulate the disparities of power, class, and ambition. All the while, Harding himself is watching her. And waiting.
The Servants Quarters, a complex and sophisticated love story, evokes a vanishing world of privilege with a Pygmalion twist. It is, as Amy Tan said, Freeds best novel yet.”
Synopsis
Now a major motion picture
Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize
New York Times bestseller
“Extreme times call for extreme reactions, extreme writing. Hamid has done something extraordinary with this novel.” —Washington Post
“One of those achingly assured novels that makes you happy to be a reader.” —Junot Diaz
At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful encounter . . .
Changez is living an immigrants dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.
But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting. And Changezs own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.
“Brief, charming, and quietly furious . . . a resounding success.” —Village Voice
A Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
A New York Times Notable Book
Synopsis
**DEBUT FICTION** Golden Country vividly brings to life the intertwining stories of three immigrants seeking their fortunes: the handsome and ambitious Seymour, a salesman turned gangster turned Broadway producer; the gentle and pragmatic Joseph, a door-to-door salesman who is driven to invent a cleanser effective enough to wipe away the shame of his brothers mob connections; and the irresistible Frances Gold, who grows up in Brooklyn, stars in Seymours first show, and marries the man who invents television. Their three families, though inextricably connected for years, are brought together for the first time by the engagement of Seymours son and Josephs daughter. David and Miriams marriage must endure the inheritance of not only their parents wealth but also the burdens of their pasts.Spanning the first half of the twentieth century, Golden Country captures the exuberance of the American dream while exposing its underbellydisillusionment, greed, and the disaffection bred by success.
Synopsis
The Wake of Forgiveness is a novel set in Lavaca County, Texas, spanning
the years 1910-1926, when a blood feud erupts after the forbidden marriages
of a wealthy Czech landowner's sons to the daughters of a prominent Spanish
horse breeder who comes to Texas seeking refuge from the Mexican Revolution.
Synopsis
Reminiscent of Kent Haruf and Cormac McCarthy, Bruce Macharts debut novel is a dark family saga set in the American Southwest.
On a moonless Texas night in 1895, an ambitious young landowner suffers the loss of “the only woman hes ever been fond of” when his wife dies during childbirth with the couples fourth son, Karel. The boy is forever haunted by thoughts of the mother he never knew, by the bloodshot blame in his fathers eyes, and permanently marked by the yoke he and his brothers are forced to wear to plow the family fields. From an early age, Karel proves so talented on horseback that his father enlists him to ride in acreage-staked horseraces against his neighbors. In the winter of 1910, Karel rides in the ultimate high-stakes race against a powerful Spanish patriarch and his alluring daughters: hanging in the balance are his fathers fortune, his brothers' futures, and his own fate.
Synopsis
Cynthia Ozick has been known for decades as one of America's most gifted and extraordinary storytellers; her remarkable new novel has established her as one of the most entertaining as well.
Set in the New York of the 1930s, Heir to the Glimmering World is a spellbinding, richly plotted novel brimming with intriguing characters. Orphaned at eighteen, with few possessions, Rose Meadows finds steady employment with the Mitwisser clan. Recently arrived from Berlin, the Mitwissers rely on the auspices of a generous benefactor, James A'Bair, the discontented heir to a fortune his father, a famous childen's author, made from a series of books called The Bear Boy. Against the vivid backdrop of a world in tumult, Rose learns the refugee family's secrets as she watches their fortunes rise and fall in Ozick's wholly engrossing novel.
About the Author
MOHSIN HAMID's first novel, Moth Smoke, was a Betty Trask Award winner, PEN/ Hemingway Award finalist, and New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His second, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a bestseller in the United States and abroad, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His most recent novel is How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Hamid's writing has also appeared in Time, the New York Times, and other publications. He lives in Lahore, Pakistan.