Believers

2009 Wingate Literary Prize Shortlist

A comic, tragic, supremely entertaining novel about one family's struggles with the consolations of faith and the trials of doubt.

When New York radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff is felled by a stroke, his wife Audrey uncovers a secret that forces her to re-examine her ideas about him and their forty-year marriage. Joel's children will soon have to come to terms with this unsettling discovery themselves, but for the meantime, they are grappling with their own dilemmas. Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, has found herself drawn into the world of Orthodox Judaism and is now being pressed to make a commitment to religion. Karla, an unhappily married social worker, is falling in love with the owner of a newspaper concession in the hospital where she works. Ne'er-do-well Lenny is back on drugs again. In the course of battling their own demons and each other, every member of the family is called upon to re-examine long-held articles of faith and to decide what - if anything - they still believe in.

Featured in the May 2009 Teen Reads newsletter.
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