Start spring with a fresh page-turner from our latest literary round-up
The Daughter of Auschwitz
By Tova Friedman & Malcolm Brabant (Quercus, £20)
Born in Poland in 1938, Tova Friedman was just five years old when she was sent to a Nazi labour camp. By six, she and her mother were loaded into one of the many cattle trucks synonymous with the Holocaust and carted off to Auschwitz-Birkenau. There, she escaped death on multiple occasions, including surviving the gas chamber. In The Daughter of Auschwitz, together with award- winning journalist and former BBC war correspondent Malcolm Brabant, she tells her remarkable story.
The Stranger's Homecoming
By Igal Sarna (Signal Books, £12.99)
At the age of 65, and leaving behind a long career in journalism, Igal Sarna fled Tel Aviv for rural Portugal. Hoping to leave behind a war-torn country and a recently lost legal battle with Prime Minister Netanyahu, he pins his future on a dilapidated building in the Alto Minho region. It sounds like fiction, but The Stranger’s Homecoming is a memoir, in which Sarna documents not only his renovations, but the secrets and stories he unearths while looking into the foundations of both the house and the community that surrounds him.
The God Desire
By David Baddiel (Harper Collins, £9.99)
Does God exist? Is the Big Guy – or Gal or They – really up there watching us eat, sleep, poop and pray? It’s a heavy question even for the lightest of hearts among us. But not for David Baddiel, who proved his ability to tackle tricky topics in his 2021 sensation Jews Don’t Count. With The God Desire, he offers us an insight into his vulnerable side – the one that wishes there was a ‘Superhero Dad’ figure looking out for humanity, if only his atheist reasonings could step aside long enough to let him believe.
By Danielle Goldstein
This article appears in the Spring 2023 issue of JR.