The Exception by Christian Jungersen

After achieving bestseller status in Europe, this wickedly unsettling thriller became Danish author Christian Jungersen’s first book to be translated into English. Two of the Danish Center for Genocide Information’s female staffers have received untraceable e-mails threatening their deaths. While suspicion falls first on an at-large Serbian war criminal, increasing paranoia infects the four women, who begin to distrust and ostracize the newest staff member before turning on each other. In the process, they discover that no one is as she seems. While Iben, Malene, Camilla, and Anne-Lise take turns narrating, Jungersen gradually reveals their intensifying insecurities, unstated jealousies, disturbing histories, and ways of protecting themselves through giving in to peer pressure or demonizing and victimizing the “other.” As their civilized facades disintegrate, the women continue their work profiling and cataloguing the war crimes that ironically echo their own potential for aggression and self-destruction. Bullying and office politics have never seemed so sinister, understandable, or terrifying.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Acclaimed author Geraldine Brooks follows up her 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner, March, with an absorbing page-turner based loosely on the true story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a fifteenth-century Hebrew manuscript saved by Muslim librarians during the 1990s shelling of Sarajevo. Razor-tongued Hanna Heath, an Aussie specialist in rare manuscripts, has landed an assignment conserving this priceless parchment covered with mysterious and atypical illustrations. Containing tiny relics within its ancient binding, the masterpiece compels Hanna to follow a trail of clues hinting at its historic travels: a coarse white hair, salt crystals, wine stains, missing ornamental clasps, and a wisp of butterfly wing. As Hanna enlists colleagues and mentors in her quest to untangle the book’s tumultuous history, she unexpectedly rips the shroud off her own multicultural past. Simultaneously, Brooks intersperses segments of the fascinating “real” history Hanna can only guess at, as the haggadah makes its perilous way through Inquisition-era Spain, seventeenth-century Venice, nineteenth-century Vienna, and twentieth-century Bosnia, Israel, and Australia.

Although not stated as such, People of the Book may be a symbol of Brooks’ hope for the continued vitality of globalized multiculturalism, despite the increasingly destructive and much-publicized clashes of contemporary civilizations. Her extraordinary codex seems impossible to burn, a sacred thing of beauty and unusually fused Jewish, Christian, and Muslim viewpoints that cannot be untangled or destroyed by cynical leaders, blind followers, or religious zealots. Hanna’s satisfaction from solving the book’s biggest mystery helps solidify its symbolic status. As witnesses to its fictionalized story, we might predict with Hanna that the book will continue to survive, skirting the fires of hate and intolerance it has bypassed for centuries.

Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink

German law professor Bernhard Schlink reached the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list with his highly moving 1997 novel, The Reader. His narrator, a law student in postwar Germany, tries to come to terms with Germany’s participation in the Holocaust when he discovers that his former lover, an older woman, has been arrested for serving as a concentration camp guard. In Homecoming, Schlink’s narrator, Peter Debauer, works to reconcile the scattered pieces of his postwar cultural patrimony by undertaking his own Homeric Odyssey. During this psychological journey, he must ask himself challenging questions: How can you come home when you don’t know where home is, or what it means? Can defining a personal notion of justice guide you to journey’s end and put an unrepentant past in its place?

Told as a child that his father, Johann, died in the war, the fragmented Debauer shuttles between his uncommunicative German mother and Swiss grandparents. When visiting his grandparents, editors of a series of pulpy novels, he discovers pages of a published book about a German soldier who escapes a Russian POW camp only to come home and find his wife with a child and another man. Unable to finish the story, the obsessed Debauer dreams up varied endings while searching for the book and its author. Through meeting his lover, Barbara, at a building that probably served as the model for the soldier’s home, the narrator discovers that he is now acting within the story itself. His participation will require him to understand why a Nazi propagandist may have written the novel, along with tracts justifying German atrocities by proposing that “whatever you are willing to take upon yourself, you have the right to inflict upon others.”

In following the mysterious author’s broken trail across Europe, Debauer finally realizes that his supposedly dead father may have dreamed up his own alternative ending: a new life that can support and develop his wartime rationalizations for inherently evil acts. After Debauer’s quest leads him to New York in search of a Swiss-born philosophy professor named John de Baur, he can decide at last where his own homecoming journey will end. A meditation on the nature of justice and the voyages we take to become ourselves, Homecoming provides no sentimental solutions, offering only the intellectual tools that can build ships to take us home.

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