City of Secrets

February 29, 2016
Jerusalem under British occupation in the years immediately following World War II serves as the backdrop for O’Nan’s (West of Sunset) intriguing new novel, a Conradian espionage thriller leavened with existential introspection. Its protagonist is Jossi Brand, a Latvian Jew who survived the concentration camps owing to his skills as a mechanic, and who now drives a cab for a living. One of the many refugees who snuck into Palestine in the late 1940s and lived an underground existence under an assumed name, Brand has drifted into a cell of the Haganah, a resistance group fighting for Jewish independence that begins sending him on increasingly dangerous and desperate missions, the tragic outcome of which seems inevitable. As depicted by O’Nan, Brand’s world is one of murky uncertainties, where betrayal by cell members is as likely as arrest by the authorities, and the secretiveness of resistance operations sows suspicion and paranoia among the cell members. Brand’s personal psychological torment compounds these effects: the only member of his family to survive the war, he is wracked with pangs of survivor’s guilt, and his earnest attempts to regain his sense of dignity through his love for Eva, a prostitute who has also lost everything, are rebuffed out of his fear that he’ll become too close to her. O’Nan’s novel works on several levels, but it is especially memorable as a story where the tortured emotions of its characters are indistinguishable from the turmoil of the chaotic events that overwhelm them. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Company.

Starred review from February 1, 2016
The protean O'Nan (West of Sunset, 2015, etc.) assumes the mantle of Conrad and Greene in a probing, keening thriller set in Jerusalem just after World War II. Brand, a Latvian Jew, lost his entire family in the Holocaust and is haunted by the passivity with which he watched fellow inmates tortured and killed in the camps. Determined not to be a victim again, he has come to Jerusalem and joined Haganah, one of several resistance groups determined to oust the British from Palestine and establish a Jewish state. Brand's cover job is driving a taxi, and one of his tasks is to ferry fellow cell member Eva to assignations as a prostitute, through which she gathers information. In their off-hours the pair are lovers, which fills Brand with guilt for betraying his murdered wife. He's not totally at ease, either, with his cell's bombings and armed robberies, particularly when Haganah joins forces with the more violently radical Irgun "after calling them dissidents and terrorists and helping the British hunt them down." The ironies echoing down to today's Jerusalem are evident, although O'Nan stays meticulously within his 1945-6 framework. As soon as Brand starts taking Eva to the King David Hotel for repeated trysts, even readers unfamiliar with Middle Eastern history will sense that apocalyptic events are impending. When they arrive, in the novel's grim climax, they make palpable the dilemma of O'Nan's conflicted protagonist: "He wanted the revolution--like the world--to be innocent, when it had never been." Though rigorously unsentimental, the text seethes with unresolved emotions, as when Brand celebrates a solitary Passover, missing Eva and pierced by memories of his dead parents and sister. He's heartbreakingly lonely and appealingly ambivalent in a world where too many people are certain the righteousness of their cause justifies any action. Economical and deliberately low-key, like all O'Nan's work, but the complex moral issues it raises linger unsettlingly.

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Starred review from January 1, 2016
Imaginative and nimble, best-selling historical fiction writer O'Nan (West of Sunset, 2015) is a master of narrative distillation, and in his latest taut novel, set in British-ruled Jerusalem immediately after WWII, he achieves thriller-like suspense. Brand, a Latvian Jew and a mechanic, lost his entire family in the Holocaust and endured internment in Russian and German camps. Bereft, he makes his way to the city and finds work as a taxi driver, shepherding tourists around military checkpoints to visit holy sites, journeys that allow O'Nan to offer incandescent and incisive descriptions of this tinder box of antiquity and modernity, the sacred and the profanethis city in revolt, riven by curfews, searches, arrests, secrets, and betrayals. Haunted by memories of his loved ones and traumatized by survivor's guilt, Brand finds himself involved with Eva, another Jewish refugee, who is getting by as a prostitute, and through her, the Jewish Resistance movement. O'Nan provides a bare-bones context for the covert battle to overthrow the British and establish a Jewish state, focusing, instead, on the complex, wrenching sorrow driving gentle, romantic, traumatized Brand, a lover of fireflies and white nights, as he seeks love, meaning, and atonement. O'Nan's engrossing portrait of an innocent caught in the web of history cues us to view today's horrific Middle East struggles with compassion. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Promotion will be energetic for perennially popular O'Nan's new release, with author appearances and interviews and plenty of social media coverage.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2016

Setting his latest novel in post-World War II Jerusalem, master storyteller O'Nan (West of Sunset) focuses on the Jewish underground movement during Israel's fight for independence. Yossi Brand, a Holocaust survivor from Latvia, joins the Haganah and works as a taxi driver, transporting members to increasingly dangerous secret meetings and missions--until he realizes he is in over his head.

Read-Alikes Anita Diamant's Day After Night, Martin Fletcher's The List, and Simone Zelitch's Louisa.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2015

O'Nan, who ranges from the just-folks Last Night at the Lobster, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, to the grander F. Scott Fitzgerald portrait in the recent West of Sunset, sets his new novel in 1945 Jerusalem. Among the tens of thousands of illegal Jewish refugees swarming the city and often fighting for an independent Israel, a man named Brand survives with a new identity furnished by the underground. He falls for another survivor named Eva but is suspicious of their cell leader, Asher. With a six-city tour.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.