Alison Pick Livres

From Alison Pick, the Man-Booker longlisted author of FAR TO GO, comes an unforgettable memoir about family secrets, depression, and the author's journey to reconnect with her Jewish identity. Shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize 2016 Alison Pick was born in the 1970s and raised in a loving, supportive family, but as a teenager she made a discovery that changed her understanding of who she was for ever. She learned that her Pick grandparents, who had escaped from Czechoslovakia during WWII, were Jewish, and that most of this side of the family had died in concentration camps. At this stage she realised that her own father had kept this a secret from Alison and her sister. Engaged to be married to her longterm boyfriend but in the grip of a crippling depression, Alison began to uncover her Jewish heritage, a quest which challenged all her assumptions about her faith, her future, and what it meant to raise a family. An unusual and gripping story, told with all the nuance and drama of a novel, this is a memoir illuminated with heartbreaking insight into the very real lives of the dead, and hard-won hope for all those who carry on after.

"We came into their valley at dawn." So begins this taut roller-coaster of a novel. From three vastly different points of view, Alison Pick relates the same vivid and rivetting story of one tranformative year. That year is 1921, and a band of young Jewish pioneers, many escaping violent homelands, have set out to realize a utopian dream--the founding of a kibbutz--on a patch of land that will later become Israel. Writing with a tightly controlled intensity, Alison Pick takes us inside the very different minds of her three key characters--two young unmarried women, one plain and one beautiful, escaping peril in Russia and Europe; and one slightly older man, a group leader who is married with two children--to depict how idealism quickly tumbles into pragmatism, and how the utopian dream is punctured by messy human entanglements. This is also the story of the land itself (present-day Israel and Palestine), revealing with sympathy and terrible irony how the enthusiastic newcomers chose to ignore the subtle but undeniable fact that their valley was already populated, home to a people that the pioneers did not want to see. Writing with extraordinary power, Pick creates unforgettable characters who, isolated in the enclosure of their hard-won utopian dream, are haunted by ghosts, compromised by unbearable secrets, and finally, despite flashes of love and hope, worn down by hardship, human frailty, the difficulties of "equality" and the pull of violent confontration. The novel's utterly shocking but satisfying conclusion will have readers flipping back to the beginning to trace patterns and wrestle with the question of what is, or is not, inevitable and knowable in the human heart."-- Provided by publisher

Includes supplement: "P.S. insights, interviews & more ..."--Cover.