Richard Zimler was born in New York and has lived in Portugal for the past 30 years. His award-winning novels have been bestsellers in a dozen countries, beginning with THE LAST KABBALIST OF LISBON, which has sold over 400,000 copies worldwide. He is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Constable & Robinson (UK), 2014
THe Night Watchman
“Zimler [is] a present-day scholar and writer of remarkable erudition and compelling imagination, an American Umberto Eco.”
—The London Spectator
Detective Henrique Monroe of the Lisbon Police Department is not your usual cop. Eccentric, elliptical—and stunningly observant—his peculiar behavior at crime scenes is legendary. His colleagues put up with it because Monroe is undeniably the best of the best. But he harbors a secret; a victim of childhood abuse, he suffers from multiple personality disorder. And when he’s called to investigate the brutal slaying of a well-connected Portuguese businessman, it’s not just the murder case that unravels.
As Monroe delves into a torrid world of political corruption and sexual violence, the details of the case trigger memories he has traveled far, and worked hard, to hide. When Monroe’s behavior becomes ever more upsetting and inappropriate than usual, even his family starts to fear for the man they thought they knew.
THE NIGHT WATCHMAN is a uniquely moving feat of storytelling that reveals the damaging repercussions of abuse, and offers a startling look at the underbelly of Zimler’s adopted home.
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Overlook Press, 2012
The Seventh Gate
“Equal parts riveting, heartbreaking, inspiring, and intelligent.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
It’s Berlin, 1932. Sophie is a smart and sexually precocious fourteen-year-old coming of age during Hitler’s rise to power. Forced to lead a double life when her father and boyfriend become Nazi collaborators, she reserves her dreams of becoming an actress for her beloved elderly neighbor, Isaac Zarco, and his friends, most of whom are Jews working against the government in a secret group called the Ring. When a member is sent to Dachau, she realizes there must be a Nazi traitor in the group. But who? Through successive mysteries, reversals, and surprises–and a race against time–THE SEVENTH GATE builds to a shattering end. In its chilling but sensuous evocation of the time and place, Richard Zimler’s novel is a love story and a tale of ferocious heroism.
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Overlook Press, 2011
The Warsaw Anagrams
“Author Richard Zimler has been deservedly called 'an American Umberto Eco,' and has his own high standards to live up to. With his latest novel THE WARSAW ANAGRAMS, he not only reaches those heights but thoroughly surpasses them.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
Autumn 1940. The Nazis seal 400,000 Jews inside a small area of the Polish capital, creating an urban island cut off from the outside world. Erik Cohen, an elderly psychiatrist, is forced to move into a tiny apartment with his niece and his beloved nine-year-old nephew, Adam. One bitterly cold winter’s day, Adam goes missing. The next morning, his body is discovered in the barbed wire surrounding the ghetto. The boy’s leg has been cut off, and a tiny piece of string has been left in his mouth. Soon, another body turns up – this time a girl’s, and one of her hands has been taken. Evidence begins to point to a Jewish traitor luring children to their death.
In this profoundly moving and darkly atmospheric historical thriller, the reader is taken into the most forbidden corners of Nazi-occupied Warsaw – as well as into the most heroic places of the heart.
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Constable & Robinson (UK), 2005
Guardian of the Dawn
“This novel delves into the darkest currents of the human mind and heart. Few readers will remain untouched.”
—The Historical Novels Review
In his previous novels HUNTING MIDNIGHT and THE LAST KABBALIST OF LISBON, Richard Zimler spun luminous historical fiction from the experience of the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula. Spanning decades and continents, GUARDIAN OF THE DAWN is set in the lush world of colonial India during the age of the Inquisition. Here is the astonishing story of Tiago Zarco, a young man whose family fled forced conversions in Portugal and now lives in a twilight between local Hindus and the ruling Portuguese Catholics. As Tiago comes of age in Goa, the capital of the spice trade, he struggles to keep the far-reaching powers of the Inquisition from destroying his family and parting him from the Hindu girl he loves. When an act of betrayal puts his beloved father in prison, Tiago is forced to hunt down the traitor and make an unimaginable choice. A harrowing journey begins–one that will show him the depths of human depravity, and the dark, poisonous salvation of revenge.
At once a grand historical adventure and a riveting tale of love and mystery, GUARDIAN OF THE DAWN brilliantly illuminates a world that has rarely been described–in a novel that blazes with passion, fury, and hope.
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Constable & Robinson (UK), 2005
The Search for Sana
“. . . a superbly talented historical novelist, capable of combining fascinating, broad-canvas glimpses of history with the most intimate portraits of the human heart in turmoil.”
—Booklist
In February 2000, Richard Zimler went to the Perth Writers Festival and met a talented dancer who told him how much his novel THE LAST KABBALIST OF LISBON had meant to her. The tragic step she would take the next day would change Zimler´s life forever, and launch him into an intense, three-year investigation of her past. He uncovers the story of two girls – one Palestinian, one Israeli – as he is led by his questions to 1950s Haifa, through a web of illusion and deceit and finally to September 11, 2001, when the tragedy he witnessed in Perth is set in the starkest of political contexts.
Blurring conventional boundaries between fact and fiction, THE SEARCH FOR SANA examines the nature of true friendship, and the inception of an unthinkable crime.
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Constable & Robinson (UK), 2004
Hunting Midnight
“Zimler is an honest, powerful writer . . . ”
—The Guardian
At the dawn of the nineteenth century in Portugal, John Zarco Stewart is an impish child of hotheaded emotions and playful inquisitiveness, the unwitting inheritor of a faith shrouded in three hundred years of secrecy–for the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula have been in hiding since the Inquisition. But a season of loss and bitter discovery brings his innocence to an abrupt end. It is only the ministrations of a magical stranger, brought to Porto by his seafaring father, that restore his safety: Midnight, an African healer and freed slave, the man who will become John’s greatest friend and determine the course of his destiny.
When Napoleon’s armies invade Portugal, violence again intrudes on John’s fragile peace, and seals his passage into adulthood with another devastating loss. But from the wreckage comes revelation as he uncovers truths and lies hidden by the people he loved and trusted most, and discovers the act of unspeakable betrayal that destroyed his family–and his faith. And so his shattering quest begins as he travels to America, to hunt for hope in a land shackled by unforgivable sin.
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W.W. Norton & Co., 1999
The Angelic Darkness
San Francisco, 1986. A city where Dionysian liberation is beginning to pall beneath a strange new darkness. When Bill Ticino’s fruitless and numbing marriage finally breaks up, he is left alone in his Pacific Heights home. Plagued by insomnia and spiritually lost, Bill becomes convinced that a housemate is the solution to his problems, and the handsome, charismatic Portuguese man Peter soon moves in. All too quickly Bill is drawn into the kabbalistic world of storytelling, occult charms, and transfiguring ritual, and begins to see that his new tenant has plans that will force him down a perilous path, one with the power to both redeem and destroy. An ineffable mixture of light and dark, desire and death, THE ANGELIC DARKNESS is an unforgettable portrait of San Francisco and its lost souls struggling to find love and intimacy in a city whose buoyancy has been eclipsed by shadow.
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Overlook Press, 1998
The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon
“ . . . vividly re-creates the world of ancient Lisbon…Zimler's portrait of the city (and the New Christians' uneasy place within it) enriches his many-layered narrative, in which a suitably complex cast of characters plays a dangerous game with fate.”
—New York Times Book Review
The year is 1506, and the streets of Lisbon are seething with fear and suspicion when Abraham Zarco is found dead, a naked girl at his side. Abraham was a renowned kabbalist, a practitioner of the arcane mysteries of Jewish mysticism at a time when the Jews of Portugal were forced to convert to Christianity. Berekiah, a talented young manuscript illuminator, investigates his beloved uncle’s murder, and discovers in the kabbalah clues that lead him deep into the labyrinth of secrets in which the Jews of Portugal sought to hide from their persecutors.