Fervor

A smart, original, and provocative debut novel about a close-knit Jewish family in London pushed to the brink when they suspect their daughter is a witch--for readers of The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin and Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Hannah and Eric Rosenthal are a successful, devoutly religious couple living in North London with their three children and Eric's father Yosef, a Holocaust survivor. When Yosef dies and their only daughter Elsie disappears, the family descends into a living nightmare. Four days later, she returns--pale, dripping wet, and different.

As events around Elsie become increasingly bewildering, Hannah and Eric begin to suspect she is under the influence of black magic, while her atheist brother Tovyah, a brilliant university student, believes his sister is suffering a mental collapse caused by his parents' antiquated religious beliefs. Can the family be reconciled before tearing itself apart?

Part The Secret History with a dash of The Royal Tenenbaums, this stunningly written novel questions what it means to be tied to an ancient ethical and metaphysical system--and if you reject that system, what is left of your identity? Told through revolving points of view, we witness a family trying to reckon with both historical and personal tragedy, to electrifying ends. A darkly comic and compellingly original meditation on family, faith, and generational trauma--Fervor is entertaining, erudite, terrifying, and unforgettable.