A sweeping historical epic following four generations of a single family as they struggle to hold on to their land and each other.
ADAMA
by Lavie Tidhar
Head of Zeus, September 2023
(via Zeno Agency)
There is no land without blood, and i water this land with the blood of my men.
Ruth’s family were in Budapest when the Nazis came.
Now Ruth is in Palestine, amid the bare hills inland from Haifa, breaking the rocky soil of an unyielding land before it breaks her.
With her comrades, her fellow kibbutzniks, she will build a better world. There will be green grass, orange trees and pomegranates, a land that is their own and no one else’s.
So they till their fields, dig their wells, build their homes and forge a new way of living, fiercely proud of their shared pursuit of a dream.
But as one generation begets another, the dream unravels, twisted into a dark tapestry of secrets and lies; sacrificed for revenge, forbidden love and murder.
Lavie Tidhar‘s work encompasses literary fiction (Maror, ADAMA and Six Lives), cross-genre classics such as Jerwood Prize winner A Man Lies Dreaming (2014) and World Fantasy Award winner Osama (2011) and genre works like the Campbell and Neukom prize winner Central Station (2016). He has also written comics (Adler, 2020) and children’s books such as Candy (2018) and A Child’s Book of the Future (2024). He is a former columnist for the Washington Post and a current honorary Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence at the American International University in London.
THE UMBRELLA MAKER’S SON follows the remarkable odyssey of 17 year old Reuven Berkowitz at the outset of World War II, whose family is sent into turmoil with the fall of Nazi bombs on their Jewish neighborhood of Kazmiereze. It is only a matter of time before the family’s umbrella making business, their apartment, their wealth and their dignity are destroyed by the Nazis. After a nighttime confrontation with an SS officer goes dangerously wrong, Reuven makes a harrowing escape from besieged Krakow to the countryside where he is taken in by a sympathetic Christian farmer and his demanding and antisemitic wife. From there, Reuven eventually journeys back to the horrors of the Nazi ghetto that Krakow has become in search of the young woman he has loved since childhood.
In 1995, journalist Olive Brown receives a threatening letter hinting at her connection to a dark past in an asylum in 1952. With a controlling and abusive husband and two young daughters to protect, Olive decides to investigate the matter herself to avoid jeopardizing her career.
It’s almost summer in 1979, and 15-year-old Aurora Taylor is a week shy of finishing her first full year at the same school. She’s desperate to see it through, because every end to her single mother’s chaotic romantic relationships results in a disruptive and sudden move. So many moves that Aurora needs more than two hands to count all the towns she’s lived in and the friendships she never got a chance to make.