Rebecca Taylor rounds up the best new books to accompany you at home or abroad this summer
INSIDE INFORMATION
By Eshkol Nevo, trans Sondra Silverston (Other Press, £16.55)
A honeymoon in South America that should have been romantic becomes more nightmarish by the minute. A Tel Aviv doctor feels an inexplicable urge to protect a young female patient. A man goes missing without a trace while taking his regular Saturday morning walk. Israeli novelist Eshkol Nevo’s darkest novel to date weaves together three turbulent and unconventional love stories in a taut psychological thriller exploring the complexities of love and intimacy.
HITLER, STALIN, MUM AND DAD: A FAMILY MEMOIR OF MIRACULOUS SURVIVAL
By Daniel Finkelstein (William Collins, £25)
Daniel Finkelstein’s beautifully-written book tells the story of how history “crashed down in a terrible wave on two happy families”. Finkelstein’s parents: Mirjam and Ludwik, were children at the start of World War II and the book moves deftly between his mother’s family in Berlin and his father’s family in Lwow, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine). Finkelstein, a Times columnist and member of the House of Lords, portrays how even politically attuned people were caught unawares by war and this is a powerful reminder that ‘liberal’ societies remain vulnerable. A new exhibition at the Wiener Holocaust Library, explores the story of Daniel Finkelstein’s family.
DEPRAVITY’S RAINBOW
By Lewis Bush (Harper Collins, £9.99)
Aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun led a life of two contradictory halves. In his last 30 years he designed rockets that landed men on the moon; in his first 30 years he designed rockets for Nazi Germany, which were built by slave labourers and killed thousands of people. Depravity’s Rainbow uses von Braun’s improbable story to explore the dark origins of modern space exploration during the Holocaust, and the way the field has till today not come to terms with this past.
By Rebecca Taylor
This article appears in the Summer 2023 issue of JR.