The River Midnight — Lilian Nattel

IN RESONANT AND ELOQUENT PROSE Lilian Nattel evokes a lost world: of a small Jewish community in Poland at the turn of the last century. It is a country suffering under the Russian occupation, and pogroms are a recent memory. Yet in the tiny village of Blaszka, life is rich and the bonds of friendship unbreakable. For Misha, the midwife, divorced and shockingly independent, for Hannah-Leah, the butcher's wife, childless and pitied by the locals, for Faygela, who dreams of the bright lights and culture of Warsaw, Blaszka is a place where anything -- even magic -- can happen.

In her astonishingly original and accomplished first novel, Lilian Nattel has guaranteed her place as one of the finest young writers of our times.