“The Believers”

An ensemble of unlikable characters traipses across the pages of “The Believers,” Zoe Heller’s latest creation: a drug addict, an unhappy housewife, a nasty mother, and a stroke victim. Her third novel, after “Notes on a Scandal,” is what the Guardian calls “an American novel: a larger, more considered, layered and utterly assured study of a family driven by political passion whose personal lives refuse to comply with prescribed ideology.” USA Today hails Heller as “a master chronicler of domestic drama.” Readers with a sadistic streak will enjoy watching things gets worse and worse for the Litvinoff family in a book that the New Yorker calls a “searing comic novel [that] takes on hypocrisy of all kinds” and provides “dazzling insight, without making excuses or offering redemption.”