Enchantment — Daphne Merkin

A bold, provocative "pioneering novel" (Los Angeles Times) about family, womanhood, and growing up

Set on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Enchantment is narrated by Hannah Lehmann, the wry survivor of a troubled childhood. Hannah's perceptions of her Orthodox German Jewish heritage -- her five brothers and sisters, the complicated power of families, the madness of money, the obsessive workings of memory itself -- are as disquieting in their sharpness as they are lucid in their irony.

The world, she finds, is a treacherous place where love is closely knit with pain, but even the limitations of her own point of view are not lost on Hannah. She is all too aware that her perspective is fixed in the vise of her childhood: “My mother,” she says, “is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at home in the world.”

This is a novel about what people say when they are talking to themselves; what families look like when they are not observed by others. Provocative, hawkishly observed, and devastating in its reliability, Daphne Merkin's Enchantment is a searing and unforgettable exploration of family and self.