World Books Review: A Masterpiece From Israel

Israeli novelist David Grossman’s new book is rooted in a reality so vivid, is so radiant with life, and is so precise in its delineation of its characters that it would be an important addition to the world’s literature at any time. But its publication now, when leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Territories are trying to broker a lasting peace, makes it required reading in a way few novels ever are.

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• World Books Review: David Grossman’s Lost Faith

World Books Review: An uneven ‘Storm’

Writers and readers are drawn to natural disasters because they create an urgency that usually makes for compelling reading. But this novel about one of the worst natural disasters in the history of The Netherlands, while it contains wonderful set pieces, is a brilliant idea that never becomes more than that — a brilliant idea.

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World Books Review: An Australian Masterpiece

Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley’s celebrated Vera Wright trilogy, available here in its entirety for the first time, memorably explores the infinite intricacies of the human heart.

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World Books Review: An Urgent “February”

Canadian writer Lisa Moore’s second novel, a harrowing tale of loss, solidifies her reputation as a gifted writer whose prose exhibits an urgency, precision, and sensitivity worthy of the legacy of Virginia Woolf.

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World Books Review: The Brilliance of Ordinary Lives

Perhaps this latest, and possibly last book, from the amazing Czech writer Joseph Skvorecky will make the Nobel prize committee take notice of an author who proffers the wisdom that comes with living long enough to sort out so many of the mysteries which plague us when we are young.

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World Books Review: Chased out of Paradise

Paula Jacques’s “Light of My Eye” is a heart-wrenching novel about the dissolution of Egyptian Jewish life, the tale of a people displaced ten years after World War II.