Gerda Charles has written five novels and some short stories. Although her fiction has won several literary prizes, it has been somewhat neglected, in view of her subject matter. While in the early 1960s she attracted a good deal of interest as one of a number of Anglo-Jewish writers, her characteristic areas of concern should be familiar to a much larger readership. She says that her ambition is to show "what it's like to be ordinary." In particular, her central characters are possessed by the suffering of being ordinary and undergo quotidian crucifixions unnoticed. As the hero of The Destiny Waltz (1971) puts it: "Everybody understands tragedy; nobody understands pain.... Nobody even wants to go outside the accepted categories of pain ... if I could be granted one gift from the Gods, it would be just that; the ability to extend the boundaries of pain; to force attention on the...