A book that is so spare, yet so full of love, exile and faith.

Set in seventeenth-century Poland after the Chmielnicki massacres, Jacob, a Jewish scholar enslaved in a remote mountain village, falls in love with Wanda, the peasant woman who helps keep him alive. When he is eventually returned to his own community, desire, law, memory and religious obligation refuse to separate cleanly.

Singer’s fiction often works through contradiction, and this is no different in its couplings of themes. It is sensual but severe, devotional but full of doubt, interested in the soul without pretending the body is admin. It has the atmosphere of folktale, religious parable and historical novel all at once, with the old Singer machinery ticking underneath: temptation, exile, guilt, survival, appetite, God, and everyone behaving like humans despite the terrible inconvenience of moral systems.

Penguin paperback, 1978 reprint; first published in the USA in 1962, first published in Great Britain in 1963, first Penguin edition 1974. Noticeable cover rubbing and edge wear, with page toning throughout. Clean, readable copy.