Here I Am is a difficult read – not because it’s not good – but because it’s uncomfortably good. The complex subject matter, the characters and the world that Jonathan Safran Foer creates rings all too true.

On the surface, this is the story of a marriage – and a failing one. Jacob and Julia have three sons and very little else left between them. Somehow, in their quest to be good parents and good Jews, they have forgotten how to be good to each other. The question that now remains is how to separate two lives so intertwined.

While this might be fodder enough for the modern novel, Safran Foer centres it on the question of what it means to be Jewish. While Jacob and Julia do not follow all the rules and customs of their faith, they are making their unwilling son, Sam, have a bar mitzvah because ‘this is what we do’. Meanwhile, Jacob’s grandfather Isaac, who lived through the Holocaust, has a very different idea of what it means to be Jewish, and he desperately wants them to remember. Only the passion of the Israeli cousins, the branch of the family that stayed in Jerusalem even when others left, approach Isaac’s commitment to their heritage.

The conflict that comes to a head when Safran Foer imagines an earthquake that lays Israel to waste, inviting her enemies to come and finally destroy her. Jacob may need to offer the ultimate sacrifice, as when Abraham said to his God, ‘Here I am.’

Reviewed by Lauren Cook