A masterpiece, a triumph of realism, precisely finished, exactly located, a miraculous marriage of accuracy and imagination * Sunday Times *
A loving and detailed portrait of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. * Globe & Mail *
His greatest work. -- Ian Samson * Guardian '1000 novels everyone must read' *
Whatever region his writing inhabits, it is blazing with life and actuality -- New York Review of Books * Ted Hughes *
He makes most contemporary practitioners of the art of fiction look like singers with only one song * Guardian *
Isaac Bashevis Singer celebrates the dignity, mystery and unexpected joy of living with more art and fervour than any other writer-one of the very best storytellers * Newsweek *

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1904, in Poland, the son of a rabbi. Fleeing fascism in 1935, he emigrated to America, penniless and knowing little English. 'I think that the whole of human history is one big Holocaust,' he said in 1987, when asked why there was no direct mention of the Holocaust in his fiction. 'It is not only Jewish history. We can call human history the history of the human Holocaust'. Singer's fiction - novels such as The Family Moskat (1950) and The Magician of Lublin (1960), and story collections such as Gimpel the Fool (1957) and The Spinoza of Market Street (1961) - became admired internationally and he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1978. He died in 1998.