Shakespeare and ‘she’ power with a Jewish twist

December is a time for sand between the toes, long lunches with family and friends (or blissfully alone), favourite drink to hand, and a glorious book in the other.

Here are some of the big releases with an underlying Jewish thread:

There are Rivers in the Sky: Elif Shafak

From the Booker Prize finalist author of The Island of Missing Trees, comes There are Rivers in the Sky. This magnificent new tale is, I think, Elif Shafak’s best yet. This book is 2024’s answer to the tour de force from Abraham Verghese The Covenant of Water last year.

I love books that contextualise biblical stories, and in Elif’s book, its Jonah’s Nineveh, on the banks of the River Tigris, that comes to life. In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.

In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptise her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS (Islamic State) and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.

In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.

A dazzling feat of storytelling, There are Rivers in the Sky binds these three lives with a single drop of water, a drop which remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers – the Tigris and the Thames – transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”

By Any Other Name: Jodi Picoult

From the New York Times bestselling author comes By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult, a novel about two women, centuries apart – one of whom is the real author of Shakespeare’s plays – who are both forced to hide behind another name. Told in intertwining timelines, this is a story about courage and finding a voice, despite the odds.

Young playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor, Emilia Bassano. But seeing it performed is unlikely in a theatre world where the playing field isn’t level for women. Then, her best friend takes the decision out of her hands and submits the play to a festival under a male pseudonym.

In 1581, young Emilia Bassano is a ward of English aristocrats. Like most women of her day, she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees all theatre productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how the words of playwrights can move an audience. She begins to form a plan to bring a play of her own secretly to the stage, by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work. Emilia is also a converso, and the novel quietly offers a fascinating glimpse into the double lives of these Jews.

The Glass Maker: Tracy Chevalier

Like most readers, I first met Chevalier via Griet, a sixteen-year-old girl living in the Netherlands in 1664 featured in the novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, which brought to life the painting by Johannes Vermeer of the same name. The book was so evocative, I made a special trip to The Hague to see Vermeer’s painting in the flesh. The Glass Maker certainly made me want to visit Murano again.

Tracy Chevalier’s new novel spans a grand sweep of 500 years, all experienced by her long-lived heroine, Orsola Rosso. It opens in 1486, and readers are treated to an incredibly rich history of both the glass industry, Venice, and Murano. We see Venice thrive, suffer, recover, survive the “Acqua Granda” flooding of 2019, and soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers in Murano. As a woman, she’s not meant to work with glass, but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make beads in secret. With her modest pursuit, Orsola becomes an artist, fashioning beads that become emblems of hope as well as necklaces for the rich and powerful.

Throughout, we get glimpses of Jewish life and influence in Venice. Although we don’t actually see inside the ghetto – the original, in Cannaregio, from whence the term originates – we do pass its walls. And get a sense of context for Jews who lived in that time. We hear of Giudecca, an island south of Venice and separated from it by the Giudecca Canal, providing produce for Venetians. Giudecca, of course, is like our English word “Judaica”, and refers to Jews. It’s typically the name for the Jewish quarters in southern Italy.

Matriarchs, Meze and the Evil Eye: Costa Ayiotis

This book isn’t about a Jewish family, but it may as well be. Matriarchs, Meze and the Evil Eye by Costa Ayiotis is a storytelling delight, as rich and tasty as his mother’s slow cooked lamb. Costa introduces us to his big, fat, crazy Greek family, its joys, its foibles, and for any of us who are part of fun-but-infuriating extended families, you will tut and snigger in recognition at his family dramas and diatribes.

In this humorous coming-of-age memoir, young Costa finds himself in the middle of a matriarchal triangle. His sulky mother, Victoria, is forced to share her kitchen with both her conservative Greek mother-in-law and her bossy sister-in-law. A raucous war in the kitchen takes place, not only for oven territory but also for the affection of their beloved “Kostaki”. This is an intricately woven portrait of the Greek immigrant experience of a family, trying to navigate South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, and echoes so much of our Jewish experience.

• Batya Bricker loves words, books, and the stories they tell. She is the GM of Books and Brand for Exclusive Books, a publisher, an author, a student, a teacher, and of course, a veracious reader.