Halban: 31 books

"The one un-Jewish feature about me is the light grey colour of my eyes, but whether I got this from a twelfth-century crusader, a fourteenth-century Black Death rioter, or a seventeenth-century Cossack, no one can tell. So numerous were the offspring of ravished Jewish women that the rabbis...

In Baghdad, Lina is trying to lead a normal life, but politics keep intruding. Violent government coups are almost annual events and it's difficult for a child to understand what's going on or who to believe. The need for secrecy means Lina cannot tell her best friend that they are just waiting for...

'I prefer autumn. In autumn, I am at my best. It will be one of my lasting regrets, when you are gone, that we won't have known each other in autumn...' Edward had hoped for Latin America, but the newsdesk sent him to Paris. In Paris there were no machine-gun-toting revolutionaries with faces like...

Wilfrid Israel was a most unlikely hero. Heir to a Jewish business dynasty in Berlin, he was a contemporary of Einstein and Spender in the cosmopolitan circles of Weimar Berlin, and emerged from his world of privilege to become German Jewry's chief (and often anonymous) emissary to the outside world...

On 24 September 1963, Yaacov Herzog arrived for an appointment at a London clinic. He was not there to see the doctor, but "Charles" – the pseudonym of King Hussein of Jordan. These secret meetings continued for nine years, during which time Herzog also covertly negotiated a agreement...

Naomi Shepherd is a prize-winning historian and biographer; here she turns her hand to fiction, revealing a razor-sharp eye, a finely attuned ear, and a keen sense of cultural dissonance. In each of these thirteen stories we see a different facet of a fast-changing country where the clash of cultures...

Ayatollah Ali Baharvand has stepped down as one of Iran's nuclear negotiators. Sickened by the revolution that failed to elevate his country to the heights it deserved, he plans to seize control and strike his own deal with the West. But how far can he be trusted?

A journalist and her fixer struggle for the truth where truth is now a victim. Nabil al-Amari is an English teacher in Baghdad, in Saddam's Iraq, when a chance encounter with Samara Katchens, an American journalist covering the war, changes his life forever. It is April 2003 and American and British...

Tales of America, adultery, football, incest, love, paranoia, sadism and Zionism.... Wickedly funny these stories may be, but heartless they are not. Disturbing images abound; like the loving family that feasts upon living butterflies; and other images that connect the themes with places deeper than...

A debut thriller of global intrigue and political conspiracy In the summer of 1531, Medici soldiers, working for Pope Clement VII, tortured to death an obscure Swiss monk, Eusebius Eisenreich. What Eisenreich would not reveal was the location of a simple manuscript, On Supremacy, that far surpassed...

After the mysterious death of one Vatican priest and the disappearance of another, Father Ian Pearse, an American working on ancient Christian texts in the Vatican, comes into possession of a mysterious scroll. He discovers ingeniously coded letters and the text of an ancient Manichean prayer that...

Clive Sinclair's first collection of stories won the Somerset Maugham Award. His second was short-listed for the inaugural Dylan Thomas Award. His third won both the PEN Silver Pen, and the Jewish Quarterly Award. This is his fourth. The new stories range from New Orleans and Texas, to Peru, Venice,...

How far would a grandmother go to stay close to her grandson? When Sylvia Garland returns to England, after the death of her husband and half a lifetime lived abroad, the last thing she expects is to find love again. But when her daughter-in-law Smita announces she is pregnant, despite her own poor...

Since his first public appearance in the late 1590s, Shylock has been synonymous with antisemitism. Many of his bon mots remain common currency among Jew-haters; among them "3000 ducats" and the immortal "pound of flesh". But Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, was incapable of inventing...