The Convert: A Novel - Hardcover

Hertmans, Stefan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1524747084 ISBN 13: 9781524747084

Publisher: Pantheon, 2020

Synopsis

In this dazzling work of historical fiction, the Man Booker International-long-listed author of War and Turpentine reconstructs the tragic story of a medieval noblewoman who leaves her home and family for the love of a Jewish boy.

In eleventh-century France, Vigdis Adelaļs, a young woman from a prosperous Christian family, falls in love with David Todros, a rabbi's son and yeshiva student. To be together, the couple must flee their city, and Vigdis must renounce her life of privilege and comfort. Pursued by her father's knights and in constant danger of betrayal, the lovers embark on a dangerous journey to the south of France, only to find their brief happiness destroyed by the vicious wave of anti-Semitism sweeping through Europe with the onset of the First Crusade/

What begins as a story of forbidden love evolves into a globe-trotting trek spanning continents, as Vigdis undertakes an epic journey to Cairo and back, enduring the unimaginable in hopes of finding her lost children.

Based on two fragments from the Cairo Genizah--a repository of more than three hundred thousand manuscripts and documents stored in the upper chamber of a synagogue in Old Cairo--Stefan Hertmans has pieced together a remarkable work of imagination, re-creating the tragic story of two star-crossed lovers whose steps he retraces almost a millennium later. Blending fact and fiction, and with immense imagination and stylistic ingenuity, Hertmans painstakingly depicts Vigdis's terrible trials, bringing the Middle Ages to life and illuminating a chaotic world of love and hate.

About this title

Review

"Extraordinarly good . . . An astonishing take . . . Hertmans conjures the medieval world with the same sensuous detailing that was so effective in War and Turpentine."
--The Sunday Times (London)

"Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care . . . The book has a quiet intimacy to it."
--Kirkus Reviews

"A tale of doomed love . . . What opens as romantically as Romeo and Juliet with the love story of two young adolescents whose wealthy, partisan, and influential families are implacably opposed, ends equally as drastically."
--The Jewish Chronicle

About the Author

STEFAN HERTMANS is an internationally acclaimed Flemish author. For more than twenty years he was a professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent, where he wrote novels, poems, essays, and plays. His previous book, War and Turpentine, was awarded the prestigious AKO Literature Prize in 2014.

Translated from the Dutch by David McKay.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 1524747084
• ISBN 13: 9781524747084
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304