Personal Weather

Like Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, this novel tells of friends and lovers coming together and being pulled apart by the rising tides of fascism. Set among the ruins of the last capital of bohemia, it is a history of the present that shows that the old cliche is true: the personal is political, and what comes for one-for Yugoslavia, for Palestine-will come for everyone else in the end. A prophecy, a warning, a love story, this is one of the best contemporary novels I have read in years.