Cressida Connolly

It’s a crying shame that Carlo Gebler’s work is not better known and that he has yet to come to the attention of Booker judges. His novel, A Good Day for a Dog (Lagan Press, £11.99), which came out in the spring, is brilliant: so well observed and concisely written and vivid that you hardly notice you are holding a book in your hands. It deals with misdemeanour and retribution, guilt and brutality, but don’t let that put you off; so does Crime and Punishment. Gebler is the real thing, a writer of rare integrity and gifts.

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (Fourth Estate, £14.99) was surely over-hyped as the great post-11 September novel. I liked the idea of its being about a New York cricket team, but it was slower than a village cricket match in the rain. 

Piers Paul Read

Three books about God whose content is described in their titles. The first, There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind by Anthony Flew (HarperCollins, £15.99), is a compelling account by an eminent philosopher of how, by ‘following the argument wherever it may lead you’ (Socrates), and taking into account the discoveries in physics and cosmology made in his lifetime, he has been forced to conclude that the universe is not an accidental construct but is the creation of an all-powerful intelligence outside space and time. A convincing refutation of the arguments put forward by atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

Yakov M. Rabkin’s A Threat from Within:  A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism (Zed Books, £18.99) is a historically fascinating account of the widespread opposition to Zionism among Jews in the first half of the 20th century, both within Palestine and in the Diaspora, which survives to this day. To them a Jew is defined not by race but by his fidelity to the Torah. Zionism is a Jewish heresy which has won widespread acceptance — like Christianity. 

For a lucid exposition of that second Jewish heresy, read Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth (Bloomsbury, £14.99) which describes the self-revelation of Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospel narrative as the God of the Torah — not merely God’s messenger or a human manifestation of the divine. ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ Written in a gentle style, and with the authority of his great learning, Pope Benedict reconstructs what has been deconstructed by various Biblical exegetes in the past. Jesus was not the revolutionary rabbi who made no claims for his own divinity but the total and final fulfilment of scripture. The God of Israel and the God of Christians is one and the same.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP