Bernice Rubens has written eleven novels, most of which have been well received by the critics. Her fourth, The Elected Member (1969), won the Booker Prize, Britain's most important and most coveted literary award. While her first four novels earned her acclaim as a perceptive and witty chronicler of Jewish family life, in her subsequent books she has extended the range of her subject matter, and in each one she seems to have set herself some new stylistic challenge. If there is any single feature that characterizes her work, it is an interest in investigating the narrow dividing line between despair and enjoyment of life and in exploring the lives of those people whose existence is delicately balanced on that line.

Bernice Ruth Rubens was born in 1928 in Cardiff, Wales, one of four children of Eli and Dorothy Cohen Rubens. Her father was born in Russia and had come...