Ten Years Gone

by Jonathan Dunsky

Private investigator Adam Lapid is a former detective with the Hungarian police and a decorated soldier who served in the Negev Desert during Israel's War of Independence.

He is also a survivor of Auschwitz, struggling to survive post-war life in Tel Aviv. 

His nights are riddled with nightmares; his days haunted by ghosts; his soul heavy with losses and experiences he cannot share.

When a small, faded, thin woman -- Henrietta Ackerland -- asks for his help finding her son in July 1949, Lapid listens with a sinking heart. He feels, as vividly as he feels the scorching July heat, that this is a futile mission that will end in heart-break.

Three Floors Up

by Eshkol Nevo; translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston

As its title suggests, this book tells three stories taking place on different floors of the same apartment building in a Tel Aviv suburb.

While these neighbors see each other in passing, leaving the ATM, or through shutters being closed, there's little direct interaction. The plots of the stories don't intermingle.

Arnon Levanoni, his wife Ayelet and their daughters Ofri and Yaeli live on the first floor across the hall from Ruth and Herman, an elderly German couple. Hani Gat lives on the second floor with her daughter Lyri and her son Nimrod. Her husband Asaf is away so often on business that the neighbors secretly nickname her "the Widow." Devora Edelman, who lives on the third floor, actually is a widow. She and her husband Michael were judges before they retired. She hasn't seen her troubled son Adar for years, ever since he turned his back on his family, after a tragic accident.

The Ruined House

by Ruby Namdar
Translated by Hillel Halkin

When this book opens "on the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Elul, the year 5760, counting from the creation of the world," Andrew P. Cohen, professor of comparative culture at New York University (NYU), is at the peak of a perfect life.

But that day, "which happened to fall on Wednesday, September 6, 2000, the gates of heaven were opened above the great city of New York, and behold: all seven celestial spheres were revealed, right above the West 4th Street subway station, layered one on top of another like the rungs of a ladder reaching skyward from the earth."

There, in the first paragraph, we are faced with the amazing and beautiful duality of this book. Page after page, author Ruby Namdar makes the real magical and the magical real.

If All the Seas Were Ink

by Ilana Kurshan

This is a collection of eloquent essays about Ilana Kurshan’s seven-and-a-half year journey through the Talmud as a daily participant in Daf Yomi.

As she read Talmud, she kept a journal that evolved into this poignant, funny, spiritual and enlightening commentary on how her modern life resonated – and clashed -- with the writings of rabbinic sages from the beginning of the Common Era.

When she began, she was 27, recently divorced from her rabbinical student husband of less than nine months and living in Jerusalem. She left behind in New York her father, a Conservative rabbi; her mother, an executive with the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York; her siblings; her friends and her colleagues in publishing.

Waking Lions

By Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Neurosurgeon Eitan Green gets off a grueling 19-hour shift and impulsively decides to drive away his frustrations by racing in the desert around Beersheba. He's admiring a beautiful moon when he hits something -- an Eritrean man about his own age.

As Eitan steps out of his SUV, he wonders what he will find and is paralyzed with fear “because when he takes that last step, he might discover that the man is no longer a man . . . And if the man lying there is no longer a man, he cannot imagine what will become of the man standing there, shaking, unable to complete one simple step. What will become of him.”

Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

When the body of the beautiful and talented Zahara Bashari is found brutally murdered in the attic of an old house in Jerusalem, every secret, every squabble, every tension between neighbors and their diverse communities is exposed by the ensuing investigation.

In the background, relations between the Palestinians and the Jews are simmering into an escalation of the Intifada.

Leading the investigation is Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon, a handsome, brooding, thoughtful man with an unfinished doctorate in history at Cambridge University.