Enchantment

Set on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the novel is narrated by Hannah Lehmann, the wry survivor of a troubled childhood. Little escapes this 26 year old's tragicomic sensibility. Her perceptions of her Orthodox German Jewish heritage, her five brothers and sisters, the complicated power of families, the madness of money, the obsessive workings of memory itself, are as disquieting in their sharpness as they are lucid in their irony. The world, she finds, is a treacherous place where love is closely knit with pain. But even the limitations of her own point of view are not lost on Hannah. She is all too aware that her perspective is fixed in the vise of her childhood: "My mother," she says, "is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at home in the world."