'Before All the World startles and swirls, and makes fresh the experience of language itself. It has it all: a gripping story, an original structure and a tender, ghostly glow' Justin Torres, author of We The Animals

I do not believe that all the world is darkness.

In the swirl of Prohibition-era Philadelphia, Leyb meets Charles. They are at a former speakeasy called Cricket's, a bar that welcomes, as Charles says in his secondhand Yiddish, feygeles. Leyb is startled to hear his native tongue spoken by this beautiful Black man from the Seventh Ward whose life will soon become entwined with his.

But Leyb is haunted by memories from before he came to America, growing up in the shtetl of Zatelsk where one day every last person - except the ten non-Jews, a young poet named Gittl, and he himself - was taken to the forest by the Red Army and killed.

When fate brings Gittl and Leyb back together, they must each grapple with how to face, and sieze, what lies ahead.

Carried along by questions of survival and hope, Before All the World lays bare the impossibility of escaping trauma, the necessity of believing in a better way, and the power that comes from our responsibility to the future. It asks, in the voices of its angels, the most essential question: What do you intend to do before all the world?

'In startling language filled with the flavour of Yiddish's combination words, [Before All the World] moves forward and back and forward again in a dreamlike trance that acknowledges how the worst suffering exists side by side with the tender beauty of memory, friendship, words and the silences of recognition' Ilana Masad, NPR, a Best Book of the Year