Helen Schulman Libri

In a novel that is part love story, part black comedy, and part searing family tragedy, Dr. David Hershleder, a brilliant but tortured Jewish neurologist on the cusp of turning forty, is thrown out of the house by his shiksa wife. He still loves her and his children, but an essential something, the piece of him that should know how to share his heart, is dead. In order to avoid the crushing weight of his loss, he embarks on a research project involving a Holocaust denier. The son of a refugee - a mother whose psychic wounds cast a paralyzing spell over her child's life - Hershleder has a growing fascination with Holocaust denial that makes perverse sense. He becomes more and more obsessed and, with the help of two oddball buddies from college, he finds and confronts a revisionist in Paris, and in the process confronts himself, exploding the lies he has constructed his own life around - his own revisionist history.

The paths of two women on opposite ends of a high-profile sexual abuse scandal set them on a devastating collision course. On a sultry summer night in Paris, two women meet on line at an ice cream kiosk in the Ile de la Cité. One is tall, fair, striking, with an indeterminate accent. The other, a troubled American TV star, is hiding her beauty and identity under a shapeless sweatshirt, wearing sunglasses even in the darkness. When two leering male tourists hassle the pair, the blonde pulls out a knife and a sisterhood is born. Both women have been victims of male violence, and both are warriors—one trained and calculating, one instinctually ferocious. They each think they know who they are dealing with. But both are very, very wrong. In a story that unfolds with unexpected humor and the pace of a thriller, acclaimed novelist Helen Schulman lays bare what happens to women—no matter how fortunate they may appear to be on the surface—whose lives have been warped by brutality and misogyny. The issues are universal, but the core of the story is intimate: a passionate exploration of love, betrayal and survival. Lucky Dogs asks and answers a shattering question: How could one woman so utterly betray another?