Synopses & Reviews
A dazzling debut novel about love, loss, and the courage it takes to start over.
Its 1994 and Adam, a drug addict from New York City, arrives at a kibbutz in Israel with a medieval sapphire brooch. To redress a past crime, he must give the priceless heirloom to a woman his grandfather loved when he was a Holocaust refugee on the kibbutz fifty years earlier. But first, he has to track this mystery woman downa task that proves more complicated than expected.
On the kibbutz Adam joins other lost souls: Ulya, the ambitious and beautiful Soviet émigrée; Farid, the lovelorn Palestinian farmhand; Claudette, the French Canadian Catholic with OCD; Ofir, the Israeli teenager wounded in a bus bombing; and Ziva, the old Socialist Zionist firebrand who founded the kibbutz. Driven together by love, hostility, hope, and fear, their fates become forever entangled as they each get one last shot at redemption.
In the middle of that fateful summer glows the magnificent brooch with its perilous history spanning three continents and seven centuries. With insight and beauty, Safekeeping tackles that most human of questions: How can we expect to find meaning and happiness when we know that nothing lasts?
Review
"Jessamyns work is first-rate: ambitious, engaging, original, and always beautifully and distinctively written." - Peter Cameron, author of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You and Coral Glynn
Review
Luminous, irreverent, and ambitious....Full of romance, tragedy, betrayal, and the constant reminder that chaos is a driving force in everyones story,
Safekeeping is a wise and memorable debut by a novelist of great talent and originality.”
The Boston GlobeA book that is greater than the sum of its parts. A complex, beautiful story about the inheritance of Jewish history.” The Globe and Mail
This beautiful story of loss and hope sweeps artfully through 600 years of Jewish resilience. With its richly drawn, believable characters and its great sensitivity, Hopes novel is a striking debut.” Booklist
When a debut novel comes along and dares just enough and hits the right notes, it deserves our attention.” Tablet Magazine
This emotional journey will leave readers with aching hearts and deepened empathy for the waifs and strays of our world.” Shelf Awareness (starred review)
An intricate tapestry of love and longing, failure and redemption. Not every character will be saved but readers will keep rooting for them.” Library Journal
"[Jessamyn Hope] may be a first-time author, but shes already a master storyteller." Baltimore Jewish Times
One of The Boston Globe's "Suggested Summer Reads" for 2015.
Included on BuzzFeed Books' "53 Books You Won't Be Able to Put Down”
Praise for Jessamyn Hope's Safekeeping:
A summer on a kibbutz; a disparate cast of characters torn by their own past lives and the inescapable burdens of history; a plot driven by a valuable gold brooch crafted by a master goldsmith in the Middle Ages: from these seemingly ordinary materials Jessamyn Hope has wrought something wonderful. I dont mean simply that her plot is compelling, utterly lucid, and deeply resonant, which it is; or that her troubled characters are created with both deep compassion and clear-eyed skepticism, which they are; or even that she writes brilliantly, which she does. Whats most wonderful about Safekeeping is the authors uncanny sense of how much of the world can be understood by keen attention to its smallest particulars, and how meaningfulness will multiply when you refuse to force upon the reader your own personal meanings. Like the exquisite gold brooch that shimmers emblematically at its center, Safekeeping seems to glow with a rich patina of timelessness, the sign of true art. Listen, do yourself a huge favor, read this book.” Mark Dintenfass, author of Old World, New World and A Loving Place
"There is no writer whose first novel I have awaited more eagerly than Jessamyn Hope, and Safekeeping surpasses my expectations. It's a brilliant and captivating novel about the past, the present, and the future, about love and legacy, and it is written with Hope's singular blend of intelligence, clarity, and grace. I am very happy it is finally here among us." Peter Cameron, author of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You and Coral Glynn
"This globetrotting, century-hopping novel is extraordinary. Fearless and tender, Jessamyn Hope holds in her hands both the sweep of history and the intricacies of the human heart. Lives shaped by larger forces must still be lived, and with desire and fear, strength and frailty, the characters in Safekeeping movingly struggle towards transformation. These are people and a story that will stick with me." Caitlin Horrocks, author of This Is Not Your City
"With a sharp eye and a masterful hand, Jessamyn Hope brings to life the complex world of one Israeli kibbutzfrom the troubled young volunteers to the new immigrant Russians to its old embattled Socialist foundersduring a single sweltering Middle Eastern summer. Rich in history, lavish in its portrayal of place, and fueled by an exciting tale about a jewel that must be restored to its rightful owner, Safekeeping is a terrifically absorbing read by a writer who knows what shes talking about. I was hooked from the first page." Joan Leegant, author of Wherever You Go and An Hour in Paradise
In Safekeeping, Jessamyn Hope explores the manifold contradictions of the people drawn to Israel as elegantly as the medieval jeweler who designed the heirloom brooch that dramatically catalyzes her plot. Both passionate and compassionate, the novel is a joy to read.” Melvin Jules Bukiet, author of After: A Novel and editor of Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
"In Safekeeping, Jessamyn Hope introduces an extraordinary cast of characters and by way of their desires and secrets weaves an intricate and moving portrait of humanity. Hope is an enormously skillful storyteller, providing great suspense while also creating the daily patterns of these memorable lives." Jill McCorkle, author of Life After Life and Going Away Shoes
"I hadn't read very far into Jessamyn Hope's beautiful novel before I knew I was in the presence of a unique talent. Her voice is unlike anyone else's, and she knows these characters inside out and has made them come alive in these gorgeously written pages. Safekeeping is cause for celebration. I admired every word of it." Steve Yarbrough, author of The Realm of Last Chances and Safe from the Neighbors
Synopsis
Adam Soccorso needs ten grand to pay off his crack dealer, so he steals an antique brooch from his grandfather who suffers a fatal heart attack when he finds the heirloom missing, clutching a fifty-year-old love letter in his dying hand. Adam reads that the only person his grandfather had ever wanted to have the brooch was Dagmar, a woman he fell in love with when he was a Holocaust refugee on a kibbutz in Israel.
Adam robs the brooch back from a jeweler and sets off for the kibbutz. There he joins characters as desperate as he is to turn their lives around. Over that sweltering summer, as these eccentrics are driven closer and closer together by the confines of the kibbutz, by love and hate, by their shared and irreconcilable dreams, they each get their last chance at redemption.
Woven throughout Jessamyn Hope's debut novel Safekeeping is the fascinating and perilous journey of the brooch, which takes us from a medieval pogrom on the snowy edge of Medieval Europe to a secret hiding place amid the devastation of WWII Dresden and through the lush pomegranate fields of the kibbutz to post-9/11 New York.
Synopsis
Spanning three continents and 700 years, Hopes luminous debut is structured around the journey of a drug user, Adam Soccorso, and his quest to deliver an antique brooch to his grandfathers long lost-love in Israel.
At the center of the story is the magnificent sapphire brooch passed down through generations. In 1994 in New York City, Adam steals the treasure from his grandfather to pay off his dealer. When his beloved grandfather finds the brooch missing, he suffers a fatal heart attack, leaving Adam to find his body, along with a letter revealing a shocking secret that sets Adam after the brooch and to a kibbutz in Israel.
There Adam finds people trying to turn their lives around: Ulya, an ambitious and beautiful Soviet émigré; Farid, a lovelorn Palestinian field hand; Claudette, an obsessive-compulsive French Canadian; Ofir, an Israeli teenager wounded in a terrorist attack; and Ziva, an old Zionist firebrand trying to stop her whole lifes work from turning into dust and who has also concealed her identity. Safekeeping is a story of not only unimaginable destruction and loss but also the astonishing will to live and the courage it takes to start over.
Synopsis
Its 1994 in New York City and Adam needs money to pay back a violent crack dealer, so he steals a brooch from his grandfather that has been in their family for centuries. When his grandfather, finding the brooch missing, suffers a fatal heart attack, Adam sets off on a journey to give the brooch to the one person his grandfather had ever wanted to have ita woman he loved when he was a Holocaust refugee on a kibbutz in Israel.
On the kibbutz, Adam joins other characters desperate to turn their lives around: an ambitious Soviet émigrée; a lovelorn Palestinian farmhand; an obsessive-compulsive French Canadian; an Israeli teenager wounded in a terrorist attack; and an old Zionist firebrand determined to stop the kibbutz she founded from privatizing. Over the summer, as these characters are driven together by the confines of the kibbutz, by love and hate, by their shared and irreconcilable dreams, they each get a last chance at redemption.
Spanning four continents and seven hundred years, Safekeeping is a profound and beautiful debut novel about unimaginable destruction and loss, as well as the irrepressible will to live and the courage it takes to start over.
About the Author
Jessamyn Hope grew up in Montreal and lived on her cousins kibbutz in Israel before moving to New York City. Chapters from
Safekeeping have appeared in
Descant Magazine and
Green Mountains Review, which nominated her for a 2012 Pushcart Prize. She was invited to be the Susannah McCorkle Scholar in Fiction at the 2012 Sewanee Writers Conference. Hope's stories and personal essays have appeared in
Five Points, Colorado Review, Harpur Palate, Prism International, and
Ploughshares, which nominated her for a 2011 Pushcart Prize. Hope has an M.F.A. in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches writing at Grub Street. She can be found online at jessamynhope.com. She lives in New York City.