An entirely unexpected adulteress, she begins an affair with a man she meets through work. Karla is the rejected, overweight oldest child, abused guardian of family delusions ('there was something in the brutal candour of her mother's sallies that pleased her'), and now the unhappy wife of a man who both resents and looks up to the feted Litvinoffs. To her atheist family, this is an outrage. She had imagined herself 'striding along in history's vanguard, like one of those muscular heroines in a Soviet constructivist poster', only to return to New York and attend an Orthodox synagogue. Rosa has spent four years in Cuba, wedded to the cause of revolutionary socialism.

She's always been a reluctant mother, but a flicker of maternal impulse is inspired by her adopted son Lenny, to whose drug addiction and wastrel ways she is oblivious, while her two biological daughters, Karla and Rosa, receive little beyond scornful chastisements and dictates about how to live their lives. The 'mark of her unparalleled intimacy with the legend' that is Joel is a 'deadpan unimpressibility'. Audrey is by now a hilarious, foul-mouthed harridan: part monster, part inspiring law unto herself, her approach so excoriatingly direct that the reader waits in wincing glee for her next spitting and swearing tirade. His subsequent coma precipitates the unravelling of a family whose supposed political unity has always - quite naturally - been riddled with hypocrisies and clashing convictions. The Believers focuses on this American-English Jewish family shortly after Joel suffers a stroke in the courtroom.

Forward to 2002 New York, neatly avoiding the heartsink of yet another 9/11 novel with glimpses of Ground Zero, and Joel is a celebrated radical lawyer, while Audrey has spent her life upholding both the uncompromising socialist politics the couple espouse and the almost mythical creation that is her husband. On their second meeting, he suggests she elope with him to his native America and she accepts the challenge. In a 1962 prologue, Audrey Howard meets the politically fervent, loud and energetic Joel Litvinoff while living a quiet London life as a typist.

The believers novel