The Believers

THERE has been a five-year wait since Zoe Heller’s second novel, Notes On a Scandal, but her third is now out in paperback.

Notes achieved most novelists’ wildest dreams, being short-listed for the Booker prize and turned into an Oscar-nominated film.

A hard act to follow, but Heller has chosen not to stick to familiar territory. Heller grew up in London, but her father was an American scriptwriter, and she has lived mainly in America since her mid-20s. She writes as sharply about America as she does about London. The Believers is a dark, but funny portrait of the family of a New York radical lawyer, Joel Litvinoff, set in New York in the edgy, post 9/11 year, 2002.