More than ever before, universities seem to be churning out precocious novelists with impeccable credentials. The British wunderkind Adam Thirlwell demonstrates the breadth of his scholarly reading in The Escape (FSG, April), as Tablet’s Adam Kirsch has noted, with a wide range of literary allusions and a loving pastiche of past masters. In this case, Thirlwell’s primary models are Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, and his protagonist is an aging British Jew, whose tale of erotic misadventures is related by a mysterious narrator much closer to Thirlwell’s own age.

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Thirlwell’s literary sophistication should not be surprising, given his academic pedigree—he won prizes at Oxford and a prestigious postgraduate fellowship from All Soul’s College—but on this side of the Atlantic, an author’s Ivy League degree does not necessarily imply scholarly erudition. In fact, the key element in Simon Rich’s Ivy education was surely not any course he took, but his tenure as president of the Harvard Lampoon. He brings impressive comedy chops to his first novel, Elliot Allagash (Random, May): son of the New York Times’s Frank and brother of novelist Nathaniel, Rich writes for Saturday Night Live and has published two truly hilarious humor collections (one piece features a kid whose mnemonic devices for AP calculus include phrases like “Stab and Obliterate the Hebrews, Crucify All the Hebrews . . .”). The novel centers on a New York prep school shlemiel named Seymour Herson who is lured into dreams of grandeur by a transfer student so rich that he cannot be expelled no matter his transgressions.

Another Harvard-educated comedian, Teddy Wayne, debuts as a novelist this spring with Kapitoil (Harper Perennial, April). Having distinguished himself with McSweeney’s pieces ranging from pitch-perfect parodies (see “Johnson’s Life of Boswell”) and “Awkward Interloper of the Realm”) to cutting satires of the contemporary writing life (“Feedback From James Joyce’s Submission of Ulysses to His Creative-Writing Workshop”), Wayne focuses the new novel on a Qatari’s arrival in New York in those carefree days when the Y2K bug was the worst threat hanging over New York City. (It’s the same time period, loyal Tablet readers should note, as the Memphis sections of Steve Stern’s The Frozen Rabbi (May, Algonquin)—the beginning of which has, of course, appeared serially right here.) The child of a couple of secular humanist New York Jews, Wayne says he has less in common with his Muslim hero than with the novel’s love interest, whom a Forward blogger calls a “surprisingly likeable Jewess.”

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As the son of bestselling authors Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, it is impressive that Jesse Kellerman—who, like Rich and Wayne, also holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard—has managed to established himself as more than just his parents’ literary heir, and more than just a genre writer. (Not that there’s anything wrong with writing a successful genre novel, or with family resemblances, for that matter; like his mother’s, Kellerman’s novels often include some sort of Jewish angle.) Kellerman’s fourth novel, The Executor (Putnam, April) is winning plaudits as a “stunning novel of psychological suspense” and “an extraordinarily complex and ambitious piece of work residing inside what seems at first blush nothing more than a typical crime novel”.  It concerns a faltering graduate student in philosophy who signs on as a conversation partner for an aging widow, and soon finds himself in over his head.

The two novellas published together as Feeding Mrs. Moskowitz and The Caregiver (Syracuse, April) similarly concern young people who care for the elderly; just don’t expect these stories to maintain the tension of a Kellermanesque thriller. Written by sisters Barbara Pokras, a film editor, and Fran Pokras Yariv, a screenwriter and novelist, the complementary stories explore the indignities of aging and the charms of the aged.

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Like the Kellerman family, Frank Tallis writes psychological thrillers, and like Jonathan Kellerman, he practices as a clinical psychologist. His recurring sleuth, Max Liebermann, applies the new science of psychiatry under the influence of Freud in 1903 Vienna, a milieu in which Zionism, psychoanalysis, and some of the most virulent anti-Semitism of the 20th century flourished. The fourth of Tallis’s Liebermann books, Vienna Secrets (Random, April) features anti-Semites, Hasids, adepts of Kabbalah, and plenty of fresh corpses—as well as a useful historical appendix surveying Freud’s attitudes toward Jewishness.

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Joseph Wallace’s Diamond Ruby (Touchstone, May), like Tallis’s novels, features a number of cameos by historical personalities including Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey. The novel can effectively be described as A League of Their Own meets The Golem’s Mighty Swing meets Mr. Vertigo: in it, a young half-Jewish, half-Irish girl turns out to have a pitching arm as strong as any in the majors. Starting out as a sideshow attraction, she soon gets mixed up with promoters, gangsters, and, of course, the hardworking folks at the Ku Klux Klan.

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Go figure: less than a year after the publication of a wonderful, massive, epic novel about the fates of Jews in World War II-era Hungary—Joseph Kertes’ Gratitude, which won the most recent National Jewish Book Award for Fiction—news arrives of a soon-to-be-published, wonderful, massive, epic novel about . . . the fates of Jews in World War II-era Hungary: Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge (Knopf, May). This might be the literary version of the phenomenon that ushered Antz and A Bug’s Life onto movie screens almost simultaneously, but it is far less annoying: why not have two novels on this subject, if they’re as thoughtful and readable as these, written by authors this talented? It might be bizarre that Kertes and Orringer tread such similar ground in rather similar ways—for one thing, both books begin with epigraphs from Miklós Radnóti—but could we ever truly have too many excellent novels about the descent into madness of one of the most cultured and sophisticated communities in Europe?

Last Friday, the sun set on the year 5769, first in Siberia and Australia, then in China, India, and the Middle East; then 5770 hurtled westward through Africa and Europe and finally arrived in the Americas. In each of these locales, on Saturday morning, Jews praised God in mostly the same words, give or take a little for doctrinal differences. It’s a wide, wide world of Jews: that’s journalist Charles London’s insight, after trekking to Myanmar, Cuba, Bosnia, and Iran, in Far From Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community (William Morrow, October), a paean to Diaspora and the furthest-flung Jews.

Given the continuing mystery of what happened to the ten lost tribes of ancient Israel, after their exile eight hundred years B.C.E., London’s exotic communities may just be the tip of an exotic Jewish iceberg. In The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford, September), Zvi Ben-Dor Benite—whose previous book explored the history of Islam in China—recounts the myths and conjectures that have arisen about where all those ancient Jews wound up, including the curiously widespread notions that Native Americans, Mongols, Anglo-Saxons, or Ethiopians descend from one or another of Jacob’s sons.

Of course, some of the experiences shared by Jews across many lands are less than pleasant: in every corner of Europe and beyond, for one prominent example, Jews suffered mightily during World War II. Steven B. Bowman’s The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940–1945 (Stanford, October) suggests that whether they fought in the Greek army, supported the local resistance, landed in concentration camps, or hid in the mountains, precious few Greek Jews avoided grief during those years. The community’s “percentage of loss during the Holocaust was exceeded only by that of Poland,” he notes.

Five hundred miles north, in Hungary, the Holocaust arrived relatively late but with no less tragic consequences. In Gratitude (St. Martin’s, October), novelist Joseph Kertes dramatizes the fate of the Hungarian Jewish community through the wartime experiences of the Beck family. Weaving in a cameo by the famed Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, Kertes, who moved to Canada in 1956 and based the story on a “family anecdote,” represents the speed with which a population of professional, comfortable Hungarian Jews found themselves subjected to harsh persecution.

In The Jewish Husband (Europa Editions, September), Lia Levi tells a roughly parallel story set in Fascist Italy, where Dino Carpi, a classics professor, marries a woman so emphatically goyish that her family name is Gentile. Though he hides his Jewish past, Levi’s epistolary novel tracks the woeful effects of anti-Semitic policies on Capri’s life. The same policies chased the author’s family from Pisa, where she was born in 1931, to Rome, where she now edits a Jewish monthly magazine and writes prize-winning books.

Like Carpi, the Løvin family discovers at the outset of Suzanne Brøgger’s novel The Jade Cat (Overlook, September), as the shadow of Nazism stretches over Denmark at the beginning of the 1940s, that as casual as they might be about their Jewish identity and as assimilated as they may feel, their Jewishness cannot so easily be sloughed off during the Nazis’ genocidal campaign. A prominent Danish author, Brøgger has one single Jewish grandmother, and the novel, unabashedly autobiographical, concentrates on the inheritances of character, courage, and nonconformity from one woman to another.

There’s no need to emphasize only the lachrymose aspects of Diaspora; Jews around the world regularly share many of the same joys, too. Like Hanukkah. As Tami Lehman-Wilzig relates in Hanukkah Around the World (Kar-Ben, September), a book for the internationally minded 9- to 12-year-old in your life, not only do David Lee Roth and James Caan light the menorah, but do so their coreligionists in Samarkand, Uzbekistan; Nabeul, Tunisia; and Sydney, Australia. Rather than latkes this December, why not whip up some of the burmelos that Turkish Jews savor, or the precipizi beloved by Italian Jews? Along with charming anecdotes, Lehman-Wilzig provides recipes for both.

Dallas-based food writer and educator Tina Wasserman targets enthusiasts of just such culinary cosmopolitanism in Entree to Judaism: A Culinary Exploration of the Jewish Diaspora (URJ, October). Proffering gustatory tidbits from settings as varied as Bulgaria, Indonesia, and Algeria, Wasserman recognizes that the vast range of Jewish cookery derives directly from the breadth of Jewish dispersion. With Jews having circled the globe as merchants and played major roles in the spice trade, could there be any culinary tradition that hasn’t at some point been incorporated onto somebody’s Shabbat table?

Perhaps that Jewish legacy of internationalism has even contributed to the remarkable restaurant culture of contemporary New York City. As former New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes notes in Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York (North Point, October), not even culinary metropolises like Paris or Tokyo manage to offer quite “as many national cooking styles, at all price ranges, as New York does.”

Jason Epstein, master editor and pioneer of the trade paperback, has certainly done his part to support fine dining in New York, as well as upholding the venerable institution of the lavish publisher’s lunch. In Eating: A Memoir (Knopf, October), he reveals that one of the perks of editing cookbooks by leading chefs like Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck is getting to dine with them on occasion. Epstein fits no one’s image of a pious Jew—asked by Commentary in 1961 how he felt about his ethnicity, he remarked laconically that while “perhaps it would be good to feel oneself engaged in a highly auspicious tradition . . . I happen not to and don’t feel at one with those who do”—and his commitment to Ipswich clams suggests kashrut runs counter to his personal faith. Yet might not Epstein’s passion for excellent food, acquired largely thanks to his “grandmother’s old world Russian meals with a Yankee accent,” itself constitute a familiar kind of Jewish tradition?