Sinopsis

Praise for If I Told You Once: 'A truly remarkable book by a truly talented young writer...somewhere between Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves and the most captivating fairytales and folklore of old.' -The Times 'Every page is a pleasure to read, and like a matrushka doll reveals smaller and more intricate layers of beauty the more one takes it apart.' -Village Voice 'Magical. You're left with the delicious thrill of having been duped - or have you? - by a master of embellishment.' -New York Times 'When Ilana glimpses a far-off city in a magical egg, she embarks on a journey that will lead four generations of her family from the frozen forests of Eastern Europe to the sweltering Jewish tenements of New York. Cultural displacement is at the heart of Judy Budnitz's engaging novel, and via Angela Carter and the Brothers Grimm, Budnitz uses fable and fairytale to pick out ageless themes with a strange new brush - diaspora, the brutality of war and the necessary, unbearable suffocation of motherly love.' -Guardian 'Judy Budnitz has achieved that rare phenomenon, a contemporary fairytale with some of the resonance and brutality of the masters of the form, and sets standards of a strangeness that are pretty hard to match. It is a powerful, evocative tale, shot through with a winning black humor and prose of simplicity and strength. It challenges its own assertion that 'there are some stories that defy telling'.' -Observer 'Stunningly evocative. Budnitz astutely explores the fantasies that are spun in the individual mind about who we are and what we are, and how sometimes these illusions are as necessary to our existence as the air we breathe.' -Time Out.