The author created his tale by drawing on his grandfather’s experience of escaping the holocaust and mixing it with fictional elements. The story revolves around a Jewish community in Ukraine across the eighteenth century, and the years leading upto the second World War. This forms the thread for Jonathan’s search in the modern day for Augustine, a woman who helped to save his grandfather from the holocaust.
Several of us found the book disjointed and felt that the way the story was told by jumping between time periods didn’t really work.
While we could admire the author’s creativity in creating Alex, the Ukranian man who acts as a translator for the inappropriate use of language but felt that this quickly changed from being amusing to annoying. There was also a chapter towards the end of the book which the most harrowing thing one of our members had ever read and stopped one of our members from finishing the book as they felt it was unnecessarily violent.
More than half of us wouldn’t have finished reading it if it hadn’t been a book club book and we gave it an average rating of 4.5/10.