
The Convert
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Nicholas Guy Smith
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By:
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Stefan Hertmans
About this listen
Finalist for the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards
In this dazzling work of historical fiction, the Man Booker International long-listed author of War and Turpentine reconstructs the tragic story of a medieval noblewoman who leaves her home and family for the love of a Jewish boy.
In 11th-century France, Vigdis Adelaïs, a young woman from a prosperous Christian family, falls in love with David Todros, a rabbi’s son and yeshiva student. To be together, the couple must flee their city, and Vigdis must renounce her life of privilege and comfort. Pursued by her father’s knights and in constant danger of betrayal, the lovers embark on a dangerous journey to the south of France, only to find their brief happiness destroyed by the vicious wave of anti-Semitism sweeping through Europe with the onset of the First Crusade.
What begins as a story of forbidden love evolves into a globe-trotting trek spanning continents, as Vigdis undertakes an epic journey to Cairo and back, enduring the unimaginable in hopes of finding her lost children.
Based on two fragments from the Cairo Genizah - a repository of more than 300,000 manuscripts and documents stored in the upper chamber of a synagogue in Old Cairo - Stefan Hertmans has pieced together a remarkable work of imagination, re-creating the tragic story of two star-crossed lovers whose steps he retraces almost a millennium later. Blending fact and fiction, and with immense imagination and stylistic ingenuity, Hertmans painstakingly depicts Vigdis' terrible trials, bringing the Middle Ages to life and illuminating a chaotic world of love and hate.
©2020 Stefan Hertmans (P)2020 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Extraordinarly good.... An astonishing take.... Hertmans conjures the medieval world with the same sensuous detailing that was so effective in War and Turpentine." (The Sunday Times London)
"Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care.... The book has a quiet intimacy to it." (Kirkus Reviews)
“[A] commanding historical novel...[that] will satisfy readers willing to be swept away into a starkly different time.” (Publishers Weekly)
Nicely done
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Unique Format
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The writer blends bits of fact in with his fiction, so skillfully I am not sure what is real and what is imagined of the woman"a life.
Splendidly written, the narrator's delivery of this story is hypnotic .
Hypnotic
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Stefan Hertmans + Nicholas Guy Smith = *****
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Captivating
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story would be better with different narration
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Great Book
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Loved every bit of it
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I loved this book, but...
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A padded mix of history and imagination
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