The Believers
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
Zoë Heller's darkly comic third novel, The Believers explores a family pushed to its limits.
When Audrey makes a devastating discovery about her husband, New York radial 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 tot 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.
'Profoundly satisfying. No other novel would readily stand in its stead . . . pulses with thematic and intellectual content . . . Heller's prose is clean, warm and smart' Lionel Shriver, Daily Telegraph
'Astonishingly well-observed and stunningly written, a subtle, funny family farce . . . in its thundering confidence,The Believers is the work of a writer at the top of her game' Guardian
Zoë Heller is the author of three novels, Everything You Know, Notes on a Scandal, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003 and The Believers. The 2006 film adaptation of Notes on a Scandal, starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, received four Oscar nominations. She lives in New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Heller (What Was She Thinking?; Notes on a Scandal) puts to pointed use her acute observations of human nature in her third novel, a satire of 1960s idealism soured in the early 21st century. Audrey and Joel Litvinoff have attempted to pass on to their children their lefty passions despite Audrey's decidedly bourgeois attitude and attorney Joel's self-satisfied heroism, including the defense of a suspected terrorist in 2002 New York City. When Joel has a stroke and falls into a coma, Audrey grows increasingly nasty as his secrets surface. The children, meanwhile, wander off on their own adventures: Rosa's inherited principles are beleaguered by the unpleasant realities of her work with troubled adolescents; Karla, her self-image crushed by Audrey, has settled into an uncomfortable marriage and the accompanying pressure to have children; and adopted Lenny, the best metaphor for the family's troubles, dawdles along as a drug addict and master manipulator. Though some may be initially put off by the characters' coldness the Litvinoffs are a severely screwed-up crew readers with a certain mindset will have a blast watching things get worse.
