The Believers

Zoë Heller's The Believers - part of the limited edition PENGUIN STREET ART series: timeless writing, enduring design.

On the flyleaf of the diary she was keeping that year, she had inscribed Socrates' words: "I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

When Audrey makes a devastating discovery about her husband, New York radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff, she is forced to re-examine everything she thought she knew about their forty-year marriage. Joel's children will have to deal with this unsettling secret themselves, but meanwhile, they are trying to cope with their own dilemmas. Rosa, beautiful, disillusioned revolutionary, is grappling with a new-found attachment to Orthodox Judaism. Unhappily married Karla is falling in love with an unlikely suitor at the hospital where she works. Adopted brother Lenny is back on drugs again.

In the course of battling their own demons and each other, every member of the family is called upon to decide what - if anything - they still believe in.