Overview

God is said to have given humans freedom. Yet in the story of Genesis God is a punishing father-figure. Why have humans portrayed him like this? Here, a contemporary writer called Adam imagines God behaving as a good father should, seeing it is time for his children to leave home. Adam writes an account of this, and the story of his own child Sophie and his relationship with her. The scene moves from London to New York to Israel to Iran to Iraq. And might not God as well as Adam have a wife to take up the cause if things go wrong?

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9781564785459

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Highly individual in style and structure, God's Hazard is vintage Mosley fiction, the sort of novel that has you stopping on almost every page to make sure you are keeping up with the intellectual debate taking place within the overlapping narratives as the boundaries between story and storytellers, writer and characters, all begin to blur.' - Peter Stanford, The Indenpendent

A Latvian activist affectingly reconstructs the tragic stories of her grandparents and parents, who were persecuted by the Soviet occupiers and deported to Siberia.The prosperous Dreifelds and the working-class Kalnietis families were among the many Latvians blindsided by the signing of a nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany on Aug. 24, 1939. It divided Europe into two spheres of influence, and Latvia, along with Estonia and Lithuania, came under Soviet sway. Soviet military bases were established, an ominous mass repatriation of Germans followed and Latvia's fragile 20-year-old independence was effectively eclipsed. Fourteen-year-old Ligita Dreifelde, the author's mother, was arrested in the middle of the night on June 14, 1941, along with her mother and father. Wearing her precious dance shoes, she was transported in a cattle car crammed with 15,000 other unfortunates to the Siberian wilderness. She and her mother were separated from her father, who died shortly thereafter, though they did not officially learn his fate until 1990. They eked out a harsh living, and Ligita was granted permission to go home to Latvia in 1948. Toward the end of 1949, however, she was deported again, though not in time to reunite with her mother, who died alone on Feb. 4, 1950. In the Siberian village of Togur, Ligita met Aivars Kalnietis, exiled with his mother in March 1949 as the relatives of a bandit. (His father had joined the partisans resisting Soviet occupation in the countryside.) They married, and the author was born in Togur in1952. Her parents, forced to work in Soviet factories, vowed never to have another child: We won't give birth to any more slaves! Although they were finally allowed to return to Latvia in 1957, the memories remained of their grim trials and the loved ones left behind in Siberian graves. Sometimes the author presents these trials in such dense detail that she loses sight of the bigger picture, but the diaries and eyewitness accounts offer a remarkable testimony of human fortitude.Powerful reading for students of European history. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Nicholas Mosley was born in London on June 25, 1923 and was educated at Eton and Oxford. He served in Italy during World War II, and published his first novel, Spaces of the Dark, in 1951. His book Hopeful Monsters won the 1990 Whitbread Award.

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