Publisher's Weekly
Fifty years in the lives of two families--one Russian-Welsh, another Jewish--are traced from WW I to the founding of Israel. PW described this as ''a novel that is for the most part breathlessly readable, touching and funny by turns, and which passes much of the history of this dreadful century in finely sardonic review.''

Library Journal
Narrated by an English Jew whose intellectual and amorous misadventures crisscross those of three bizarre children of a Welsh father and a Russian mother, the story--from the sinking of the Titanic to the founding of Israel--is a melange of fact and fiction, often outrageously broad and comic. But a substratum of anguish is also evident. Love endures but rarely satisfies. Strife, violence, and rebellion abound: British prisoners die escaping; Russian DPs fail to avoid repatriation; Welsh nationalists initiate a futile uprising. Suggesting that we seek peace and love through forgetting and forgiving, Burgess lacquers his ''message'' with a vaguely mythic overlay that focuses on King Arthur's sword but fails to signify definitively. Readers should nevertheless enjoy Burgess's wondrous energy and imagination. His scenes are ever vibrant, his personages memorable.-- Arthur Waldhorn, City Coll., CUNY