Arts & Entertainment

Sail Into Summer

Our annual summer reading roundup looks at books
perfect for relaxing during the balmy days ahead.

Gail Zimmerman

Arts & Entertainment Editor

FICTION
The Hebrew Tutor of Bel Air by Allan Appel (Coffee
House Press; paperback; $14.95; to be released July 1)
is a corning-of-age and falling-in-love tale set just after
the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which a studious teenager is
hired to prepare a Bel Air, Calif., heiress for a bat mitzvah
she doesn't want; with comic twists and turns, the two
forge a tentative truce and learn to shape their own des-
tinies.

The Disappearing Dowry: An Ezra Melamed Mystery
(Zahav Press; paperback; $9.99) by Libi Astaire, set in
1810 Regency England and combining a Jane Austen-like
voice with a Sherlock Holmes-style story, tells the tale of
the Jewish Lyons family as it prepares for the marriage
of eldest daughter Hannah; when the family patriarch,
a member of England's Jewish elite, suddenly loses his
fortune and his daughter's dowry is stolen, wealthy Jewish
widower and benefactor Ezra Melamed, in an attempt
to restore the dowry to its rightful owner, uses a key, a
button and a few cryptic words from a Chasidic rabbi to
search for clues in some of London's darkest places.

The Silent Man by Alex Berenson (G.P. Putnam's Sons;
$25.95), the New York Times reporter who won the 2007
Edgar Award for best first novel for The Faithful Spy,
brings back CIA agent John Wells for the third book in
this spy series (The Ghost War was the second); this time,
Wells tracks his adversaries to Russia, where the heart
of the country's nuclear complex has been infiltrated,
and then Europe, discovering an Islamic terrorist plan of
unimaginable consequences that he must try to stop.

The Last Testament by Sam Bourne (HarperCollins;
$26.99) — the literary pseudonym of Jonathan
Freedland, an award-winning British journalist and
broadcaster who moderated a Guardian newspaper-spon-
sored dialogue that was influential in the 2003 Geneva
Accords — is a religious conspiracy thriller centered on

Middle East conflict, fundamentalist faith and a collision
of hard-line ideologies; the action opens in 2003 dur-
ing the looting of the Baghdad Museum of Antiquities
— when a teenage Iraqi boy finds a tablet in a long-for-
gotten vault — and quickly moves to Israel and the West
Bank, where peace negotiator Maggie Costello is plunged
into the investigation of a series of murders of archaeolo-
gists and historians, a high-stakes game of international
politics, an underground trade in stolen antiquities and a
final, unsolved riddle of the Bible.

You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr (Ecco;
$25.99) is the debut novel by the New York Times colum-
nist of "Scent Notes" (which has won him praise for his
sharp insights and lyrical descriptions of our sense of
smell) and introduces female narrator Anne Rosenbaum,
brilliant, with a doctorate in literature, and the quiet but
beloved English wife of a powerful Hollywood studio
executive who finds herself leading a book club that
becomes a must-attend for the Hollywood elite (well-
known figures from the worlds of film and publishing
make cameo appearances); but when their son is rejected
by an Israeli yeshivah for being "impure," Anne's husband
becomes a strictly Orthodox ba'al teshuvah, believing he
must divorce Anne, a non-Jew, and extinguish his love for
her.

Shalom India Housing Society by Esther David (The
Feminist Press; paperback; $15.95), an author, sculptor,
art critic and columnist for the Times of India who was
born into a Jewish Bene Israel family in India and raised
in a zoo created by her father, is a novel set after the
2002 religious riots in Ahmedabad, when a group of the
Bene Israel unite in the Shalom India Housing Society
apartment complex, where they are watched over by
the Prophet Elijah; vignettes — from lavish costume
competitions, to the bittersweet daily meetings of the
Laughing Club, to forbidden romance with non-believ-
ers — reveal the issues the community faces as it is
torn between the lure of Israel and its own unique Indo-
Jewish heritage.

Ladies and Gentleman, The Bible! by Jonathan
Goldstein (Riverhead Books; paperback; $15), a This
American Life regular contributor, re-imagines and
recasts the Bible's Old Testament in a series of short sto-
ries for a neurotic, modern world, with wit and snappy
dialogue and answering old-age questions like "Wouldn't
a person get bored living in a whale?"

The Believers by Zoe Heller (Harper; $25.99), the highly
praised and best-selling novel first published in England,
portrays one contemporary New York City family's unravel-
ing when a renowned leftist radical lawyer, Joel Litvinoff,
suffers a sudden, massive stroke; his wife, Audrey, finds
herself alone and ill-equipped to deal with the secrets of
Joel's life that begin to emerge and, increasingly bitter with
her own grown children who have failed to live up to her
expectations, she is forced to examine her life with Joel and
her commitment to their 40-year marriage.

Pictures at an Exhibition by Sara Houghteling (Knopf;
24.95), a Harvard grad who received her master's in fine
arts from the University of Michigan, is a debut novel set
in Paris during the dark days of World War II and tells of
a son's quest to recover his family's lost art masterpieces
looted by the Nazis during the Occupation; the author,
who injects elements of romance into her tale, draws on
the real-life stories of France's art-dealing families and
the forgotten biography of the only Frenchwoman to work
as a double agent inside the Nazis' looted stronghold.

Almost Home by Pam Jenoff (Atria Books; $25) is a mys-
tery/spy thriller that makes use of the author's years with
the State Department and student days at Cambridge
University in England to tell the story of American Jordan
Weiss, whose idyllic experience as a grad student and
coxswain at Cambridge is shattered when her boyfriend
Jared drowns in the River Cam; 10 years later and now a
Foreign Service diplomat, she returns to her old stomping
grounds to find out why Jared, and his research on World
War II war criminals, was silenced.

Sail Into Summer on page C6

June 25 <, 2009

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