Bernice Rubens has enjoyed a long and varied career as documentary film writer, director, and novelist. She has received many awards, including the 1968 American Blue Ribbon Award, the Booker Prize in 1970, and the Welsh Arts Council Prize in 1976. Her ninth novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978, and she was made a fellow of the University of Wales, Cardiff, in 1982. Born into a Jewish émigré family, Rubens was acclaimed on the basis of her early novels as a witty chronicler of Jewish life. In later novels, however, she diversified, writing in third and first person from the perspectives of men and women, Jews and gentiles. Although her subjects change, her themes are universal: guilt and loneliness are experienced by Jews and gentiles alike. It is a testament to her capacity for compassion that the emotionally crippled (the broken individual, the outsider) take center stage in...