When the radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff collapses in the courtroom and suffers a stroke that puts him in a coma, his loud, sprawling English-American Jewish family is thrown into chaos. For his wife, Audrey, an hilariously confrontational Englishwoman who eloped with Joel in the Sixties and has spent 40 years parading the family’s socialist cause and fighting to believe in nothing but her legendary husband, a crisis of faith occurs with the arrival of his ex-mistress Berenice Mason and her four-year-old son.

For their younger daughter, Rosa, who has spent four years in Cuba, imagining herself “striding along in history’s vanguard, like one of those muscular heroines in a Soviet constructivist poster”, a return to New York results in attendance at an Orthodox synagogue and the condemnation of her atheist family. For Karla, the docile, overweight oldest child, an unlikely affair with a man at work offers her a way out of an unhappy marriage to a trade union activist, but she struggles with a vast subterranean chamber of anxiety about her weight and fertility. It seems that for all their “impeccably progressive, internationalist upbringing” among the liberal intelligentsia and their education in how to live with high ideals but no illusions, the Litvinoff children are riddled with private terrors and unable to handle the most basic of emotional exchanges.

Meanwhile, Lenny, the drug-addled adopted child who was rescued by Joel and Audrey from his criminal mother, has turned out to be a nothing more than a living reproach to their philanthropic impulse. While Joel’s prognosis worsens, Lenny struggles with his addictions without hope of recovery.

This is a big, biting, brilliant exploration of faith in the modern world and a dysfunctional New York family struggling to live with Marxist heavyweight Antonio Gramsci’s dictum that “the challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned”.

Zoë Heller wrote a weekly confessional column for The Sunday Times for four years. She now lives in New York and the Bahamas with her husband and two children. She says that she wrote this novel after having read about scientists who were trying to locate the belief gene. “It struck me as a good metaphor for something I’ve often felt about friends and acquaintances who are believers: that there’s something in their brain structure, their hard wiring, that makes them different from me.”

“Hilarious, touching, unexpected, moving.” The Times Literary Supplement

“Large, intelligent and stunningly written.” The Guardian

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