Badenheim 1939, by Aharon Appelfeld (Quartet, £7 in UK)

Badenheim, as its name proclaims, is a spa town and in spring of 1939 visitors gather there for an annual music festival. Predictably, they are mostly Jewish and the fiery breath of the Holocaust can already be felt, though they try unsuccessfully to shut it out. The characters are mostly academics and intellectuals who talk about Buber and other cultural matters, yet they wake up to find that their world has fallen to pieces. The book is short, little more than a novella, but the atmosphere of the time and place is delicately evoked. Incidentally, the author, originally from the Bukovina, lost his mother under the Nazis, survived a spell in a labour camp, and is now an Israeli citizen.