Awake in the Dark

Tales of terrible times, told economically and without appealling to tears - and this dry, rough way of telling episodes that happened gives them more impact. I really liked it.

This book will not leave you indifferent. It will stir very strong emotions deep inside you and will send a shock wave through your being. Populated with extremely powerful images, these stories will stay with you forever. The elegant language and masterful use of suspense contribute equally to the power of these stories.

Beautifully written. It took my breath away. I couldn't put the book down. I love the stories, I immersed myself in all the characters, I wanted to know more. I felt the character's sorrow and desire to learn about their past. These stories will stay with me forever.

How do descendents of Holocaust victims and perpetrators come to terms with the unthinkable atrocities that their ancestors witnesssed, experienced, and sometimes inflicted? In Shira Nayman's emotionally rich and psychologically brilliant stories, her heroines stumble upon, often at great psychic peril, the truth about the enormous suffering their relatives endured or, in some cases, caused. There is breathtaking urgency in these stories in keeping with the best of psychological thrillers. As if this were not enough, Ms. Nayman writes with such poetic grace and visceral intelligence that the reader knows herself to be in the hands of a literary talent of the highest order. Ms. Nayman's intrepid characters, compelled to seek the most awful of truths, are literary descendents of Oedipus, Electra, Antigone, Hamlet, and Lear, whose terrifying struggle between blindness and insight give them tragic and univeral dimension.

Haunting, painful, beautiful and frightening. I read this book in two hours, devouring the words like a starved person at a feast. I was totally immersed in the stories, lost to the world around me. I have rarely read a book that stayed with me so strongly long after I had finished reading it.