Kraven Images

It is 1974 and Nicolas Kraven, lecturer in English Literature at Mosholu College in the Bronx, is adrift upon a sea of troubles: his affair with his neighbour's wife threatens to progress from Thursday night to permanence; his students are a mixture of campus revolutionaries, predatory sexual exhibitionists and an old man intent on proving Merlin was a Jew; an elderly academic specialist in Love, possessor of a devastatingly effective aphrodisiac and a libido that belies her years, has alarming designs on his person; the Kraven demons, a familial curse, are in hot pursuit; and a spectre from his past, the one man who can smash this already chaotic life into ruins, is expected imminently. 
 
Kraven flies to London, where he finds brief consolation in the arms of Candy Peaches, a stripper from Sausalito, and then to Harrogate, the town to which he was evacuated as a child, there to confront the ghost of his father, and to slay Kraven's demons.

Clerical Errors

'Alan Isler is brilliant... The wit is sumptuous and sophisticated, the timing and pace perfect' - Daily Telegraph

A delightful mix of both wit and profundity. The combination of rich vocabulary, a decent plot, and Isler's unnerving ability to assume the identity of his characters can't help but result in a novel you'll wish was longer!

Alan Isler, as usual, manages to combine almost Wodehousian comedy with painful, unsentimental tragedy

A superb new comic novel... wildly funny... Like the stories of Malamud and Singer one senses that the true hero of Clerical Errors is the story itself

Terrifically funny. Isler has once again come up with a winning voice for his narrator, by turns witty, bawdy and lugubrious

Through Father Music's rambling all-embracing voice, Isler gives us one of the funniest, most moving novels of faith, love and loss in years

Edmond Music, Catholic priest and director of Beale Hall research institute, has a secret: he doesn't believe in God. And that's not all. For the past forty years he has shared a bed with his housekeeper, Maude Moriarty from Donegal. In fact Edmond Music isn't even Edmond Music. He's Edmond Music, French child of Hungarian parents - and a Jew. 
 
As he sees out his days in his Shropshire mansion, devoting his time to kabbalistic studies, his buried pasts threaten to end the charade. Fred Twombly, professor of English from Joliet, Illinois, and half-century-long enemy, has arrived, determined to destroy him. What may be Shakespeare's lost masterpiece has disappeared from the Hall's famous library. Edmond must be to blame.

Alan Isler

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. 
 
A youthful tale of geriatric amateur theatrics and one of the most powerful and affecting comedies of modern times. 
 
In the Emma Lazarus retirement home in uptown Manhattan, the Jewish inmates embark on a chaotic, bitchy production of Hamlet. But for our hero, Otto Korner more is at stake than simply directing his quirky, libidinous fellow residents in the play. Somebody knows Otto's secret, and as comedy and tragedy combine he is transported back to his pre-American past in Germany, Zurich, and finally, Auschwitz. 
 
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Prince of West End Avenue was a critical sensation on its first publication in 1994. A youthful tale of geriatric amateur theatrics, its dramatic curtain call ensures this is one of the most powerful and affecting comedies of modern times.

Alan Isler

Books by Alan Isler

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter