The believers - Zoë Heller

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

When Audrey makes a devastating discovery about her husband, New York radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff, she is forced to re-examine everything she thought she knew about their forty-year marriage. Joel’s children will soon have to come to terms with this unsettling secret themselves, but for the meantime, they are trying to cope with their own dilemmas.

Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, is grappling with a newfound attachment to Orthodox Judaism. Karla, an unhappily married social worker, is falling in love with an unlikely suitor at the hospital where she works. Adopted brother 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 decide what — if anything — they still believe in.