In 2000s London, historian Helen Watt, who is ill and near retirement, is called to an old house where workers have found a hidden cache of seventeenth-century Jewish papers. Alongside a young American graduate student, Aaron Levy, she begins to decipher them. The documents lead back to 1660s London, where Ester Velasquez, a young woman with unusual learning, works as a scribe for a blind rabbi during the plague and the Great Fire, while questions of faith and a false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, stir the community.
The book suits readers of historical fiction who like academic detective plots and the intellectual life of women in the past. It is also for anyone curious about Sephardic Jews in early modern England.
Balanced in tone; a moderate read.
Best for readers like The Story Seeker. Which reader are you?
- Published
- 2017
- Language
- EN
