Hopen, D: Orchard (e-book) (used book) | David Hopen | bookbook.eu

Description

A debut novel about the disaffection, and eventual moral dissolution, of a group of friends at a highpressured Orthodox Jewish high school in Miami, based loosely on a Talmudic legend in which four rabbis enter an ‘orchard’ and leave fundamentally changed. Inspired by Donna Tartt’s THE SECRET HISTORY and Marisha Pessl’s SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS and more recently in the vein of M.L. Rio’s IF WE WERE VILLAINS, the novel centers around yeshiva-student Ari Eden at the moment his family has moved from a drab neighborhood in Brooklyn to the technicolor world of Miami and environs, transplanting him from the daily rhythms of study and prayer to the social whirl of his glossy new school. The book explores what happens when Ari’s new friends, a wayward and exclusive clique, turn their Talmudic study group into a risky experiment in mysticism, threatening to take down their whole world with it