A tender and compellling memoir of the author's grandparents, their literary salon, and a way of life that is no more. The House of Twenty Thousand Books is the story of Chimen Abramsky, an extraordinary polymath and bibliophile who amassed a vast collection of socialist literature and Jewish history. For more than fifty years Chimen and his wife, Miriam, hosted epic gatherings in their house of books that brought together many of the age’s greatest thinkers. The atheist son of one of the century’s most important rabbis, Chimen was born in 1916 near Minsk, spent his early teenage years in Moscow while his father served time in a Siberian labor camp for religious proselytizing, and then immigrated to London, where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx and became involved in left-wing politics. He briefly attended the newly established Hebrew University in Jerusalem, until World War II interrupted his studies. Back in England, he married, and for many years he and Miriam ran a respected Jewish bookshop in London’s East End. When the Nazis invaded Russia in June 1941, Chimen joined the Communist Party, becoming a leading figure in the party’s National Jewish Committee. He remained a member until 1958, when, shockingly late in the day, he finally acknowledged the atrocities committed by Stalin. In middle age, Chimen reinvented himself once more, this time as a liberal thinker, humanist, professor, and manuscripts’ expert for Sotheby’s auction house. Journalist Sasha Abramsky re-creates here a lost world, bringing to life the people, the books, and the ideas that filled his grandparents’ house, from gatherings that included Eric Hobsbawm and Isaiah Berlin to books with Marx’s handwritten notes, William Morris manuscripts and woodcuts, an early sixteenth-century Bomberg Bible, and a first edition of Descartes’s Meditations. The House of Twenty Thousand Books is a wondrous journey through our times, from the vanished worlds of Eastern European Jewry to the cacophonous politics of modernity. The House of Twenty Thousand Books includes 43 photos.

This is the story of Sasha Abramsky's grandparents, Chimen and Miriam Abramsky, and of their unique home at 5 Hillway, around the corner from Hampstead Heath. In their semi-detached house, so deceptively ordinary from the outside, the Abramskys created a remarkable House of Books. It became the repository for Chimen's collection of thousands upon thousands of books, manuscripts and other printed, handwritten and painted documents, representing his journey through the great political, philosophical, religious and ethical debates that have shaped the western world. Chimen Abramsky was barely a teenager when his father, a famous rabbi, was arrested by Stalin's secret police and sentenced to five years hard labour in Siberia, and fifteen when his family was exiled to London. Lacking a university degree, he nevertheless became a polymath, always obsessed with collecting ideas, with capturing the meanderings of the human soul through the world of great thoughts and thinkers. Rejecting his father's Orthodoxy, he became a Communist, made his living as a book-dealer and amassed a huge, and astonishingly rare, library of socialist literature and memorabilia. Disillusioned with Communism and belatedly recognising the barbarity at the core of Stalin's project, he transformed himself once more, this time into a liberal and a humanist. To his socialist library was added a vastrove of Jewish history volumes. Chimen ended his career as Professor of Hebrew and Jewish studies at UCL, London and rare manuscripts expert for Sotheby's. With his wife Miriam, Chimen made their house a focal point for left-wing intellectual Jewish life: hundreds of the world's leading thinkers, from at their table. The House of Twenty Thousand Books brings alive this latter-day salon by telling the story of Chimen Abramsky's love affair with ideas and with the world of books and of Miriam's obsession with being a hostess and with entertaining. Room by room, book by book, idea by idea, the world of these politically engaged intellectuals, autodidacts and dreamers is lovingly resurrected. In this extraordinary elegy to a lost world, Sasha Abramsky's passionate narrative brings to life once more not just the Hillway salon, but the ideas, the conflicts, the personalities and the human yearnings that animated it. 'The sheer richness of this marvellous book - in terms of its style, think Borges, Perec - amply complements the wondrous complexity of the family - in terms of its subject-matter, think the Eitingons, the Ephrussi - about which Sasha Abramsky writes so lovingly. And as a portrait of London's left-wing Jewish intellectual life it is surely without equal.' Simon Winchester 'I loved this touching and heartfelt celebration of a scholar, teacher and bibliophile, a man whose profound learning was fine-tempered by humane wisdom and self-knowledge. We might all of us envy Sasha Abramsky in possessing such a remarkable grandfather, heroic in his integrity and evoked for us here with real eloquence and affection.' Jonathan Keates 'Sasha Abramsky has combined four kinds of history - familial, political, Jewish, and literary - into one brilliant and compelling book. With him as an erudite and sensitive guide, any reader will be grateful for the opportunity to be immersed into the house of twenty thousand books.' Samuel Freedman 'The House of Twenty Thousand Books is a grandson's elegy for the vanished world of his grandparents' house in London and the exuberant, passionate jostling of two traditions - Jewish and Marxist - that intertwined in his growing up. It is a fascinating memoir of the fatal encounter between Russian Jewish yearning for freedom and the Stalinist creed, a grandson's unsparing, but loving reckoning with a conflicted inheritance. In the digital age, it will also make you long for the smell of old books, the dust on shelves and the collector's passions, all on display in The House of Twenty Thousand Books.' Michael Ignatieff

'I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific' Sarah Waters 'If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man' Nick Hornby Patrick Hamilton's novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne's new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell. The Midnight Bell, a pub on the Euston Road, is the pulse of this brilliant and compassionate trilogy. It is here where the barman, Bob, falls in love with Jenny, a West End prostitute who comes in off the streets for a gin and pep. Around his obsessions, and Ella the barmaid's secret love for him, swirls the sleazy life of London in the 1930s. This is a world where people emerge from cheap lodgings in Pimlico to pour out their passions, hopes and despair in pubs and bars - a world of twenty thousand streets full of cruelty and kindness, comedy and pathos, wasted dreams and lost desires.

Who can Lena trust to help her find out the truth? Life in East Germany in the early 1980s is not easy for most people, but for Lena, it’s particularly hard. After the death of her parents in a factory explosion and time spent in a psychiatric hospital recovering from the trauma, she is sent to live with her stern aunt, a devoted member of the ruling Communist Party. Visits with her beloved Uncle Erich, a best-selling author, are her only respite. But one night, her uncle disappears without a trace. Gone also are all his belongings, his books, and even his birth records. Lena is desperate to know what happened to him, but it’s as if he never existed. The worst thing, however, is that she cannot discuss her uncle or her attempts to find him with anyone, not even her best friends. There are government spies everywhere. But Lena is unafraid and refuses to give up her search, regardless of the consequences. This searing novel about defiance, courage, and determination takes readers into the chilling world of a society ruled by autocratic despots, where nothing is what it seems.

“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

"Virginia Scharff's wonderfully readable account of women in motion complicates and enriches our understanding of the nineteenth and twentieth century Wests. Her gendered remapping of the regional landscape explodes traditional notions of western movement. All students of women and gender, travel and place, the West and America, would do well to read this excellent book."—David M. Wrobel, author of Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West "Virginia Scharff claims for women what has long been central to the masculine mythology of the West—free movement and its many gifts, real and imagined. Her book is as exhilarating and as intellectually and emotionally expansive as our enduring dream of flight across the American land."—Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado "Brilliant is not a word that is often a part of my critical vocabulary, but brilliantly is how Twenty Thousand Roads begins. When writing of Sacagawea and Susan Magoffin, Virginia Scharff shows vividly how a single life can be a source of sophisticated cultural analysis without becoming an academic artifact or an object of condescension."—Richard White, author of It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West