Badenheim 1939

This beautiful novel opens on the eve of World War II as a group of middle-class Jews arrive in the resort town of Badenheim, somewhere in Austria, ready to spend another idyllic summer vacation. But Europe in 1939 is no vacationland. Rumors of war rumble into the resort town, but the characters struggle to convince themselves that everything is perfectly normal. The great pleasure of the book comes in the Kafkaesque quality of Appelfeld's eye for the everyday and his restrained prose, set against the intimations of the approaching catastrophe. A great introduction to this important Israeli writer.

• Austerlitz (Modern Library (Paperback))
• The Reader
• Survival In Auschwitz
• Who Loves You Like This
• Everything Is Illuminated
• Maus : A Survivor's Tale. I. My Father Bleeds History. II. And Here My Troubles Began
• This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Penguin Modern Classics)
• The Story of a Life
• Fatelessness
• The Guide of the Perplexed (Hackett Classics)