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The Believers
The Believers
Aug 7, 2025 6:58 AM

Author:Zoë Heller

The Believers

Zoë Heller's darkly comic third novel, The Believers explores a family pushed to its limits.

When Audrey makes a devastating discovery about her husband, New York radial 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 tot cope with their own dilemmas.

Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, is grappling with a new found 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.

'Profoundly satisfying. No other novel would readily stand in its stead . . . pulses with thematic and intellectual content . . . Heller's prose is clean, warm and smart' Lionel Shriver, Daily Telegraph

'Astonishingly well-observed and stunningly written, a subtle, funny family farce . . . in its thundering confidence, The Believers is the work of a writer at the top of her game' Guardian

Zoë Heller is the author of three novels, Everything You Know, Notes on a Scandal, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003 and The Believers. The 2006 film adaptation of Notes on a Scandal, starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, received four Oscar nominations. She lives in New York.

Reviews

A joy. Celebrates the real world and revels in its mad glory

—— Sue Townsend , Sunday Times

I was irresistibly reminded of Alan Bennett - there is the same wry humour, wonderfully telling selection of detail or remark . . . a fine balance of humour and poignancy

—— The Times

The salty prose of an original poetic voice

—— Melvyn Bragg , Observer

A thoughtful, witty combination of travel writing, autobiography and Alan Bennett-style diary

—— John-Paul Flintoff , Daily Telegraph

Laugh-out-loud funny . . . has all the resonant precision of a poet's ear and eye

—— Independent

An original and talented writer . . . highly entertaining and there are flashes of wit and moments of tenderness and brilliantly accurate observation

—— Vernon Scannell , Sunday Telegraph

The best book I have read in a long time on what he insists is the true North of England

—— Geoffrey Moorhouse , Daily Telegraph

P.G. Wodehouse is the gold standard of English wit

—— Christopher Hitchens

To dive into a Wodehouse novel is to swim in some of the most elegantly turned phrases in the English language

—— Ben Schott

Wodehouse is so utterly, properly, simply funny

—— Adele Parks

I've recorded all the Jeeves books, and I can tell you this: it's like singing Mozart. The perfection of the phrasing is a physical pleasure. I doubt if any writer in the English language has more perfect music

—— Simon Callow

Wodehouse was quite simply the Bee's Knees. And then some

—— Joseph Connolly

I constantly find myself drooling with admiration at the sublime way Wodehouse plays with the English language

—— Simon Brett

Quite simply, the master of comic writing at work

—— Jane Moore

To pick up a Wodehouse novel is to find oneself in the presence of genius - no writer has ever given me so much pure enjoyment

—— John Julius Norwich

Compulsory reading for anyone who has a pig, an aunt - or a sense of humour!

—— Lindsey Davis

The Wodehouse wit should be registered at Police HQ as a chemical weapon

—— Kathy Lette

Witty and effortlessly fluid. His books are laugh-out-loud funny

—— Arabella Weir

The funniest writer ever to put words to paper

—— Hugh Laurie

The greatest comic writer ever

—— Douglas Adams

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century

—— Sebastian Faulks

Sublime comic genius

—— Ben Elton

You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour

—— Stephen Fry
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