Last Train from Liguria by Christine Dwyer Hickey

Atlantic

So you’re raving about it?
…writing as deep and warm and soft as a kiss, a story as stark as a knife, you have to read it, it’s going to be 2009’s big Irish novel. Buy three copies at least, because this is the kind of book you press on your friends, and you’ll want to keep one for yourself.
Gripping from the start?
Actually, no. It starts with a depressing scene from the 1920s when a drunk wakes up having apparently murdered his sister, and goes on the run.
Charming
At first you’ll keep reading because of the beauty of the writing, which has the kind of immediacy where you actually think you’re the characters. Which is amazing, because they’re very different from each other - reserved, wise Bella in the 1930s, her messed-up granddaughter Anna in the 1990s, whose one-night stand is one of the funniest scenes I’ve read.
So what’s the story, morning glory?
Bella goes to work as a private tutor to Alec, the son of a beautiful German Jewish woman and a dying Italian aristocrat. ‘Edward King’ - the putative murderer of the first scene - is his music teacher. Over the years they become loving surrogate parents to Alec, whose mother remarries and basically forgets him. Then the anti-Jewish laws come into effect in Italy, and they have to try to smuggle him out before the Nazis get him.
I don’t really like those Holocaust novels
Me neither - there’s often a kind of lip-licking excitement about them. But this is different - you get to love Alec, and the reserved Bella and secretive Edward, and the odd lives they live.
I didn’t know Italy deported Jews?
Me neither, either. But they did - and Alec’s stepfather pays lots of money to priests and nuns to get him out, using his teachers to smuggle him and his baby half-sister, in a terrifying flight. I promise you, this is the best book of the year. It’s extraordinary.
Publisher's site

All Our Worldly Goods by Irene Nemirovsky

Chatto & Windus €22.94
WARS bracket the lives of the characters in All Our Worldly Goods: the Great War, which obliterates their home village, their factories and their fortunes; and World War II, which divides their country.
Irene Nemirovsky never saw this book published - she had died in Auschwitz, probably gassed as she was dying of cholera.
It is absolutely French, absolutely bourgeois.
Nemirovsky's family - Russian Jewish bankers - fled Russia during the Revolution when she was a teenager and settled in France, and she fatally adored everything about her new country.
Yet Nemirovsky's writing is Russian, and Jewish. She writes with the luminous observation of Turgenev, and her subject is family, seen with sympathy, humour and a kind of warm distance.
Here, her subject is the Hardelot family of St Elme, whose factory-owners have been the autocratic patriarchs of the village for generations.
They build nice houses for their workers, educate talented children and employ them at low salaries - but indignantly refuse requests for a swimming pool or a sports stadium.
The same indignation destroys the family, when patriarch Julien sets his face against his grandson Pierre for marrying the woman he loves, not the hard businesswoman Julian has chosen.
In a story that's gripping, funny and sad, this family will be familiar to all lovers of the Irish Big House genre.
Publisher's site

Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett

ZUGZWANG is a chess term used when a player must move, but any move makes his position worse.

In Ronan Bennett's thriller, Jewish psychoanalyst Dr Otto Spethmann is a man who stays away from politics.

But in the Russia of 1914, where Bolsheviks and Tsarist secret police are conducting an underground war, and the Black Hundreds - the anti-Semitic fascists - are hunting down supposed Jewish plotters.

Spethmann has two new patients. One is Avrom Chilowicz Rozental, a neurotic but brilliant chess player. "Rozental seemed destined to become the third World Chess Champion, feted everywhere from Berlin to New York, Tokyo to Buenos Aires."

But in the days before the St Petersburg chess tournament of 1914, Rozental is close to total breakdown, and the slithery Polish violinist and (possibly) political activist RM Kopelzon brings him to Spethmann for analysis.

The other new patient is the famous beauty Anna Petrovna Ziatdinov, wife of a "little lawyer with a violent temper", but more to the point, daughter of the terrifying man known as the Mountain, suspected of funding the Black Hundreds.

Spethmann and his beloved and wayward daughter Catherine soon become the target of the secret police. Both in his life and in the chess game that inhabits the book and reflects the action, he is in zugzwang.

A story impossible to put down, yet a little distant in its engagement with the era of revolution, Zugzwang works better as analogy for today's 'war against terror' than as a straight thriller.