Invisible City

by Julia Dahl

When her editor sends her to get a story at scrap yard where a woman's dead body has been discovered, freelancer Rebekah Roberts finds herself face-to-face with the Hasidic community her mother once ran away from.

Rebekah never knew her mother, Aviva. A year after Rebekah's birth, Aviva abandoned Rebekah and her father to return to the Hasidic world she came from.

As Rebekah digs deeper into the life of Rivka Mendelssohn, the murder victim, the more similarities with Aviva Rebekah  she sees.

Married to the much older owner of the scrap yard, Rivka had four children, one of whom had recently died. She reportedly had been making visits to a house on Coney Island designed to help members of the tightly knit, rigidly observant Hasidic community explore life outside the community. There were rumors as well that she was involved in an extra-marital affair.

The Ladies Auxiliary

by Tova Mirvis

The Ladies Auxiliary describes a year in the life of an Orthodox community in Memphis, Tenn.

The year begins in early summer with the arrival of Batsheva Jacobs and her young daughter Ayala. It ends just after Shavuot the following year.

Through that year, the community goes through tumultuous times that lead to two teenagers in the community leaving, separately and under dramatically different conditions.

Triangle

By Katharine Weber

On March 25, the 108th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire will be observed. The fire, which broke out near closing time on a Saturday afternoon, killed 146 workers, mostly women, many of whom jumped to their deaths to escape the flames. It was the 9/11 of its time.

The tragedy spurred major reforms in working conditions in New York City’s sweatshops and helped unions gain acceptance.

Triangle tells the story in three voices. Esther Gottesfeld, the last living survivor of the fire at 106, is heard from only indirectly through interviews and trial transcripts. She has kept key secrets for a lifetime. Ruth Zion is a self-serving feminist researcher with a nose for missing information and an astute ability to suggest what fits into the blanks. Internationally renowned composer George Botkin marries Esther’s granddaughter, Rebecca, a genetic researcher.

Testament

by Kim Sherwood

When painter Joseph Silk dies, the world pays tribute. For John, the son he didn't love, and Eva Butler, the granddaughter he did, there is little agreement about who Joseph Silk was.

In the gap between Silk's death and his funeral, Eva wanders through his "Blue Room," a combination studio and library of the color of blue. After being beaten in a German labor camp, Silk became partially color blind; blue was the color he saw best. The room is filled with postcards of seas and ice fields, soccer shirts, torn Levis, milk of magnesia bottles, peacock feathers, tea tins, amethyst crystals -- all shades of blue.

The Genizah at the House of Shepher

by Tamar Yellin

In the attic of the Shepher house at Kiriat Shoshan in Jerusalem, aging paper turns to dust. The trash and treasures of three generations of the family tumble into chaos.

In this geniza, an accidental find is made. It is a book, a codex, a bound manuscript of the Torah that doesn’t precisely match the accepted version of the Torah today.

Is this a national treasure? Will it change the fate and fortunes of the Shepher family? Does it even belong to them?

Winter Journey

by Diane Armstrong

In 1941, on a sunny July morning, 1,500 Jews living in and around Nowa Kalwaria, Poland, were rounded up, forced into a wooden barn and set on fire. In the town itself, blood puddled in the streets as Jews were pulled out of shops and homes and murdered.

At the opening of this book, the main character, Halina Shore, a forensic dentist affiliated with coroner’s office in Sydney, Australia, knows nothing of Nowa Kalwaria. Although she was born in Poland, she and her mother, Zosia Szczencinska, immigrated to Australia in 1947 when she was nine.

Halina’s seemingly perfect life is falling apart. She ended an eight-year-old relationship with a married lover, Rhys Evans, editor of an influential tabloid, when he published a damaging article about the coroner’s office. Halina, misled about the subject of the article, was quoted. Her boss reprimanded her. Then, testifying in a court case against a man Halina believes to be guilty of torturing and murdering a child, the jury was unconvinced and let him go.

Seeking a break, she decides to accept an invitation from the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland to join a team investigating a mass grave at Nowa Kalwaria. Their objective is to determine if the victims were killed by the Nazis – or by local Poles. As the Polish-born president of the International Association of Odontologists, Halina is the perfect candidate for this team and has experience with similar teams in other areas.

In the Image

by Dara Horn

Dara Horn's Jewish-themed book is lush with images and paradoxes.

Reading In the Image is like walking on a beach. If you focus on the details, you see shells and cabochons of surf-blasted glass. You smell the salty tang of the breeze ruffling your hair. You feel the sand scouring your feet. If you take the long view, you see the pulse of tides and blue-green water that touches every inch of shoreline on every continent. The vast connectedness of it humbles you.

Horn’s many-layered story ripples out from the lives of William Landsmann and Leora, his late granddaughter’s best friend. (The granddaughter, Naomi, was killed in a hit-and run accident in the New Jersey suburbs.) The book looks at Landsmann’s past – and Leora’s present.