The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Set in the Jewish homeland of … Alaska, this is a brilliantly original novel from Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’.What if, as Franklin Roosevelt once proposed, Alaska – and not Israel – had become the homeland for the Jews after the Second World War? In Michael Chabon’s Yiddish-speaking ‘Alyeska’, Orthodox gangs in side-curls and knee breeches roam the streets of Sitka, where Detective Meyer Landsman discovers the corpse of a heroin-addled chess prodigy in the flophouse Meyer calls home. Marionette strings stretch back to the hands of charismatic Rebbe Gold, leader of a sect that seems to have drawn its mission …