Prayers for the Living: A Novel - Softcover

"It is a pleasure to recommend a novel this good and this wise." Sanford Pinsker, Hadassah Magazine"Prayers for the Living troubles notions of righteousness and forgiveness, madness, and fate, providing no easy answers while still leaving readers feeling edified. Cheuse's is a challenging and intelligent novel, replete with beauty and heartbreak, and perhaps even containing a measure of redemption." Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword Reviews"Cheuse's complex approach to storytelling via conversations, letters, and prayers is so much bigger than a typical narrative, as is this provocative story." Denise Hoover, Booklist Online"If this morally complex saga of one man's rise and spectacular fall in late 20th century America is typical of the quality of the [new] publisher's titles, its future is promising." Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness"The tragic story...makes for an interesting, intense and unforgettable read." Caresa Alexander Randall, Deseret NewsPraise for Prayers for the Living:"[Prayers for the Living] deserves to live among the great novels of Jewish American experience. It is a book that bears the weight of something old, yet feels new and utterly alive at the same time." Tova Mirvis, author of The Ladies Auxiliary, The Outside World, and Visible City (from the foreword)"'I want the world,' shouts William Dubin, the biographer-protagonist of Bernard Malamud's Dubin's Lives, raging at a life that thinks he should survive without passions. Meet Dubin's kinsman Manny Bloch, the tormented, cursed hero of this fine novel by Alan Cheuse. At once tender and brutal, unsparing and wise, Prayers for the Living masterfully ventriloquizes not only the voices of Manny and the people he cherishes and destroys, but those of an entire America staring at itself in a cracked mirror." Boris Fishman, author of A Replacement Life"A tour de force of voice, character, and psychology from an American master at the height of his powers. Minnie Bloch's tale of her family's slow disintegration echoes Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! recast in New York and New Jersey, a search for understanding and meaning amidst the wreckage of a life gone off the rails in pursuit of the American dream." Christian Kiefer, author of The Animals"Cheuse enlarges the immigrant tale of aspiration and loss. His narrator, in a lyrically heightened dialect as bold and capacious as the voices of William Faulkner, propels the story toward its conclusion with a dire largeness of scope that deserves the word 'tragic.'" Robert Pinsky, author of Gulf Music

Prayers for the Living is a novel both grand in its vision and loving in its familiarity. Presented in a series of conversations between grandmother Minnie Bloch and her companions, Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio commentator on All Things Considered, unfolds a layered family portrait of three generations of the Bloch family, whose members are collapsing under everyday burdens and brutal betrayals. Her son Manny is a renowned, almost legendary rabbi. Respected by his congregants and surrounded by family, no one suspects that he yearns for a life of greater personal glory, but when an oracular bird delivers what Manny believes to be a message from his deceased father, he abandons his congregation in pursuit of a life in business and his entire life spirals out of control.As Manny's fortunes rise in the corporate realm, he falls deeper into an affair with a congregant, a Holocaust survivor, his wife sinks deeper into alcoholism and depression and his daughter, traumatized by a sexual scandal at college, makes Manny the target of a plot to shatter his newly-found empire. The devoted family matriarch, Minnie, observes and recounts the tragic downfall of her family, unable to save them from themselves.