J David Simons: 5 books

A beautiful novel about one woman's obsession with the life of a silent movie star as she struggles to accept life's compromises. Finding herself to be on the wrong side of fifty for a female film star, Laura Scott's career is on the slide. She has an opportunity to reverse this downward spiral...

'A genuine tour-de-force' --Lesley McDowell on 'An Exquisite Sense of What Is Beautiful'. Palestine, 1920s. Working as an agent for one of the richest men in the world, Polish-Jewish immigrant Lev Sela finds himself swept into a relationship with Celia Kahn, a mesmerising Scottish pioneer, after stumbling...

"A quietly brilliant book" The Skinny. Suffragettes in Scotland. With rent strikes, anti-war sentiment, Cat and Mouse wrangling in London and a revolution brewing in Russia, a young Jewish woman in Glasgow discovers a taste for protest and the empowerment made possible by birth control....

"A truly fine debut" Rodge Glass. 1911. Avram Escovitz, a young Jew, arrives in Glasgow from Russia. He dreams of playing football until WWI intervenes and he begins work as a credit draper, peddling goods to Highlanders. A stranger in a strange land, Avram must set up a new business and...

In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that “America” is at war. This paradox of in/visibility concerns the gap between...