Life With A Star - Softcover

Without a doubt, one of the outstanding novels I've read about the fate of a Jew and the Jews under the Nazis. I don't really know of one like it. --Philip Roth

An astonishing work of fiction . . . Jiri Weil's sophisticated, modernist, human imagination has made the dark horror of the Holocaust into an occasion of enlightenment. --New Yorker

A unique and deeply moving book, filled with echoes of Kafka and hints of Kundera and Skvorecky. --Observer

'One of the finest novels of the century.' Independent

Stitched onto the jacket, worn over the heart, according to the rules for all Jews, the star turns Josef Roubicek into an outsider in his own city. Forced to lurk on the edges of Prague, to work as a gravedigger at the cemetery, and to keep off the trams and streets after curfew, he waits for a summons from them. Every day the grinding bureaucracy of evil brings new regulations, along with new lists of names to join the transports.

This remarkable novel traces one Jewish man's struggle to exist in Nazi-occupied Prague. Drawing strength from the smallest of things – a lost love, a stray cat, an onion – Josef determines to live, and realises that surviving against the odds is the greatest act of resistance.