Product Description

A comic, tragic, supremely entertaining novel about one family's struggles with the consolations of faith and the trials of doubt. When Audrey makes a devastating discovery about her husband, New York radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff, she is forced to re-examine everything she thought she knew about their forty-year marriage. Joel’s children will soon have to come to terms with this unsettling secret themselves, but for the meantime, they are trying to cope with their own dilemmas. Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, is grappling with a new-found attachment to Orthodox Judaism. Karla, an unhappily married social worker, is falling in love with an unlikely suitor at the hospital where she works. Adopted brother Lenny is back on drugs again. In the course of battling their own demons and each other, every member of the family is called upon to decide what - if anything - they still believe in.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56063 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review
Profoundly satisfying. No other novel would readily stand in its stead.In her third novel, Zoë Heller injects just that difficult-to-pinpoint something-or-other that elevates soap opera to art. The text is infused with intelligence; the story is firmly set within a larger social fabric whose texture feels authentic....beautifully realised characters and an engaging storyline. ...Pitch perfect. --Lionel Shriver, The Daily Telegraph

Review
Funny, moving and very, very, true. A brilliant, brilliant book.

Review
A fitfully brilliant history of a complex, dysfunctional New York Jewish family.

Customer Reviews

mixed feelings
This is an book, which I really wanted to like and did - but only to a point. it's the story of a New York secular Jewish left wing intellectual family which, in itself, seemed a bit derivative, and how their various belief systems fall apart and are restructured after the patriarch falls ill. To me the problem with the book was it was mainly head with little heart. We had scenes in an orthodox Jewish community, scenes in a prison, scenes with an over-privileged girl from Florida, scenes with under-privileged black girls from Harlem with names like Chianti, liberal left wingers. It was all very well drawn and observed but ultimately you felt lists were being ticked off in an effort to provide a state of the nation work. The main characters move among these scenes like pawns. They were recognisable types but it was hard to sympathise with any of them. The final couple of scenes felt like a rapid wrapping up and at this point my credulity was tested. Heller is such a good writer, fluent and funny, but I think she is trying too hard to escape her history as a columinist detailing her own life and in the process emotion gets lost. I wish she'd not fight shy of it, her columns were genius in my opinion and had the personal touch this novel sadly lacks. I'm looking forward to her getting it right next time. I'm sure she can.

Five Years In The Waiting!
It's been five years since Zoe Heller wrote Notes On A Scandal, and after reading The Believers I do believe it was well worth the wait. Heller is a genius at creating obnoxious characters, who are hateful and totally unlikeable yet spinning an unputdownable story at the same time.

The Believers opens when Audrey and Joel first meet in London and then moves quickly to New York in 2002, they have now been married for 40 years and the story really starts from there.

Joel is a very succesful, out-spoken New York lawyer and Audrey has been his dutiful and very outspoken wife for all these years. When Joel is taken very ill and the family discover his secret, they all start to examine how they feel about themselves and each other.

The whole family are very brittle and extremely disfunctional - with no likeable or warm characters amongst them, yet you still need to know what they will do next. Audrey, the mother is a particularly nasty piece of work and her outbursts of bad language and un PC comments are kind of delightful in her own way! The whole family hate each other and hate themselves and each one them questions their beliefs and views throughout the book.

This is totally absorbing and very compelling, but, I do feel that it may become a 'Marmite' book - you will either love it or hate it.

I loved it - I hope it's not another five years before her next book

You won't be disappointed...
There was such an enormous amount of expectation surrounding the arrival of this book for me - five years on, could anything come close to the assured masterpiece that is Notes on a Scandal? The answer is absolutely yes.

It's a very different book to Notes - ostensibly an `American novel' while Notes was so solidly British. It's about a dysfunctional Jewish family (the Litvinoffs) in New York who are trying, in the light of a family emergency and the consequent uncovering of a devastating secret, to work out what (and who) they believe in.

Darkly funny, subtle and deliciously written, The Believers is, by a long shot, one of the best literary novels I have read in years. And Audrey Litvinoff, the mother hen in the book, is sure to become one of literature's great villains - she's monstrous, hilarious and a creation of pure brilliance.