So, I'm feeling conflicted about this book. It was full of beautiful writing and things that were really good. There were also things I didn't like, and some I absolutely hated.

Let's go over the good parts first! The writing style is really strong and it was an enjoyable read. The unique structure of the mosaic-like interconnected stories was one of the parts I appreciated most. I loved many of the characters, and they were well-developed and full. You can also really tell how well-researched this novel is, which is always interesting. I learned plenty of things I hadn't known before. The story was always interesting and each point of view added something new.

One thing I didn't like very much was the supernatural elements of the novel. They just felt out of place to me, and very awkward, including the historical backstory we get told through a scroll towards the end. Maybe it just isn't my thing or I don't understand the genre (is it magical realism?), but I didn't enjoy it.

There will be some spoilers in this section, by the way. And now to the thing that I hated: Shelley. Okay, I didn't fully hate Shelley, because he was a charming and funny character. But he was also a disgusting creep, and this was never addressed or criticised by any of the other characters. They just accept his actions as normal, which makes it seem like the writer does too. But some of Shelley's highlights include: sleeping with his 16-year-old cousin as a fully grown man (which is even more creepy when you read the later passages about their relationship as one was an actual child and one was much older), cheating on absolutely every partner he ever had, going on a date with a woman who was 19 when he was over 30 and proceeding to get his, uhm, genitals out under the table and putting her hand on it. ON THE FIRST DATE. Within like the first five minutes. That part was so disturbing to me. First of all, that's sexual harassment, if not downright assault. And secondly, no woman, even in that time period, would be so unbothered by it. But instead of being terrified and appalled and disgusted, this girl proceeds to fall in love with him and marry him. Do men not know that this is an absolutely abhorrent experience when it happens to us? It's disturbing, not flirty. Can they please stop romanticizing it?

If not for the good parts of this book, I would have rated it lower just because of Shelley. Especially that first date scene.

dnf @ 25%.

cw // incest, paedophilia, biphobic undertones.

it pains me to write this, because i was truly enjoying the story & its characters, but i feel like there’s a couple of tropes that make it impossible for me to carry on reading it, even though it saddens me to shelf a book that delves into sephardic culture & the holocaust in an otherwise interesting way. but i don’t feel comfortable reading certain types of stories, and this is certainly one of those. mild spoilers for the first quarter of the book ahead.

first off, shelly’s characterisation seemed somewhat icky to me from the very beginning — i’ve grown extremely tired of the promiscuous bisexual man trope, but i thought that the author himself would know better or that he at least would explore the character’s sexuality in a respectful way. clearly i was wrong about this — every time shelly’s name came up the narrator seemed incapable of separating him from the amount of sexual encounters that he’d had, going as far as uncomfortably talking about his own sex life to a thirteen-year-old boy (?!). i never loved this, but i wanted to keep on reading, partly because i thought there’d be some sort of explanation as to why shelly deals with his sexuality the way he does. and perhaps there is one further along the line, but i didn’t want to stick around after finding out the next (and perhaps most problematic) issue i had with this book.

the narrator’s dad, benni, was trapped inside the warsaw ghetto while his cousin shelly (whom the narrator refers to as “uncle shelly” all along), eleven years his senior, went around europe “drinking booze and fucking” (this is an actual quote taken from the book, said by uncle shelly to the narrator when he was thirteen). he then eventually got to canada & settled there before going back to fetch his cousin, the only survivor in their entire family. so far, so good. but then this happened and i swear to god almighty that i haven’t felt this irked about something i’ve read in a book for a very long time:

Dad gazed down again. ‘Shel was my first. I mean, I was lost. He helped me. He returned to Poland to try to locate Esther and me. When he found me . . . I was just sixteen.’
‘I’m glad your first time was with a real expert.’

????? i cannot begin to describe how wrong this felt to me. there’s the fact that they’re cousins, but most importantly that shelly was ELEVEN YEARS HIS SENIOR, which would make him twenty-seven when he decided to screw around with a sixteen-year-old boy who had just been through a bloody genocide. and the author just drops it so mindlessly? with the narrator being perfectly content with what his father just told him? i don’t know, i just found it extremely off-putting, not to mention the fact that the whole thing was never addressed again (this happened around the 12% mark, and i carried on for a bit right afterwards). shelly was characterised in such an awful way, riddled with stereotypes about bisexual men that i personally find extremely harmful, that i finally had to put this down. i cannot possibly plod through another 400 pages of this, particularly when the relationship between benni and shelly (again! cousins! with benni being a minor when they first hooked up!) is never so much as problematised. again, it may happen later in the book, but i honestly don’t think it’s worth it to stick around and see what happens next.

so yes, it’s extremely upsetting for me to drop this book like this, because i think zimler’s writing is quite solid and that he definitely knows what he’s talking about (i read into his biography and he comes from a sephardic family as well), but i just can’t ignore such a massive red flag. i hate writing such negative reviews, but i thought that other people may want some content warnings before diving in, and that’s precisely why i wrote it to begin with. i hope this book finds its target audience, but it’s definitely not me (which is ironic, because i love jewish history, the kabbalah and reading about the warsaw ghetto, but whatever).

We are fortunate that Net Galley and Parthian Books made this ARC available for review. The author is not a newcomer. "Richard Zimler was born in New York in 1956 and now resides in Porto, Portugal. His twelve novels have been translated into twenty-three languages and have appeared on bestseller lists in twelve different countries, including the United States, the UK, Australia, Brazil, Italy and Portugal. Five of his works have been nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, the richest prize in the English-speaking world, and he has won several other accolades for his fiction across Europe and North America."
All of that aside, this is a jewel of a book, beautifully written from multiple POVs without losing the reader. The background of the holocaust and its indelible damage to the two protagonists is there always and everywhere. The question is, how does one make a life after such a beginning. Each cousin goes his own way to discover the answer and the reader is swept away with the narrative. I'm looking forward to reading others of Zimler's novels.
(The publication date in November appears to be the European edition. In US it has been available since July and the Kindle edition price is discounted and has the benefit of the Xray feature.)

thank you netgalley this was an enlightening read.
i didn't know this was a part of something bigger when i requested to read i just wanted to know more i guess, and know more is exactly what i recieved. i can't say i wasn't lost sometimes while reading but it was a ride I'm so glad i got on.

This book is amazing in its simplicity. It tells a story about two Holocaust survivors dealing with the survivors' guilt and deeply-rooted trauma. Though the book doesn’t have details of what happened in the camps it can be sensed and felt throughout the end of the book. The story of these two men has been written from multiple POVs that bring out their complex emotions. It’s heartbreaking to know how the trauma affects the people who are close to them and the next generation.

The book is woven with Jewish culture, religion and mysticism intricately giving the reader an authentic feel. The book has a lot of references in Yiddish, Hebrew, Navajo, Polish, Ladino, French and Spanish that enhance the experience of reading the story of Benni and Shelly.

This is the first book which I have read about the Holocaust from a survivor's POV and I am glad that I chose to read this book. This will be released on 7th November and I would recommend this book if you love reading good Historical fiction.
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Thank you to @netgalley and @parthian_books for providing me with the DRC🙏🏻

Thank you NetGalley for providing me an e-ARC in return for an honest review.

I think a good word for this book is honest. It is so deeply and honestly though-provoking. Zimler does not write to impress, to enrage or to provoke. He writes gently and meticulously, interweaving personal narratives into a heart-breaking symphony for the mind. There would be no greater-fitting title for this book than the one it has now.

This book is absolutely brilliant and has touched my soul the way a story hasn't in quite a while. 

While reading, even if nothing specifically tragic was happening, I kept bursting into tears, so that finishing this book took a bit longer than I thought it would. Nevertheless, I finished it in about 3-4 days. 

The way Richard Zimler writes is fabulous in a way that's hard to pinpoint or specify. His text is not made to be a tearjerker, it does not exploit trauma, and it's not graphic at all, and yet it makes you experience the complex histories, thoughts, feelings, and traumas of all the characters we get the POVs of, and all the others they are connected with through Bennie's incandescent threads. 

As an amateur translator, the beautiful way languages are intermingled in the work made it so much more wonderful, and it strongly connected to Jewish identity and history. I also loved the decision of not translating sentences not in English, most of the time. I discovered a small Hebrew and Yiddish dictionary at the end of the book, but even with this addition, it doesn't lessen the impact of having Yiddish, Hebrew, Ladino, English, French, Navajo, Spanish, Portugese, Polish, ingrained in the very core of this book.

This story is complex, rich, made with love, care, and understanding. It is multifaceted and real in an almost painful way.

This book was beautiful. The writing was lyrical and breathtaking, and I absolutely loved how all the threads of the story came together and connected the characters and their stories. My only complaint is that it was occasionally confusing with how the story jumped between characters and time periods.

Beautifully written, captivating stories—as described, a mosaic with the theme of familial love and connection tying it together. More relationship- and character- than plot-driven,

Once I got into it, I loved this book. Benni & Shelly’s survivor guilt from the Holocaust has left scars too deep to heal. These two men’s characters are shaped throughout as others impact their stories with gut-wrenching pathos. It’s an interwoven tapestry of humour, despair, warmth, love and historical relevance. If you haven’t read about the Holocaust before, this is the book that will enlighten you.
I think the title represents the content perfectly.
The only thing I had difficulty with was in identifying who was narrating the changed point-of-view in sections of the book. I was confused until I worked it out. Was that a deliberate device by the author? I think putting the new narrator’s name above each new section would be of enormous help.
Thanks for the opportunity to read this magnificent manuscript for an honest review.

Thanks to Netgalley for the chance to review this amazing novel. The title perfectly sums up the nature of the story it contains. The characters, their lives and motivations, demons and drives were so relatable and eloquent. The harshness and beauty of the lives they were able to build in spite of the horrors they experienced. I gained a deeper understanding of the cultural and personal ghosts that haunt so many and why. The numerous ways to be haunted and grateful, cursed yet blessed. I was occasionally confused with how the story jumped from character to character, time period to time period. But it always came together and pulled me in. Incandescent threads connecting our lives and destinies to one another.
I truly can't recommend this novel highly enough or to enough people. Everyone should read this book and have a chance to be made better by it.