If the life too often takes the place of the plot, this is redeemed by a vivid evocation of what it was like to grow up in the pre-state Israel of the 1940s, with all the music and dynamism and the constant sense of siege.

ECONOMIST: New fiction

Next came the collapse of Gescartera, a stockbroking house run by an ambitious financier, he too with well-placed friends: a complex tale of greed, nepotism and fraud that cast a vivid light on Spain's traditional old-boy network in business.

ECONOMIST: Some juicy scandals are jangling the government��s nerves