Five Amber Beads is the story of two men whose lives are woven together as they seek to discover the truth about their pasts. Charley Bernstein works in the London art world and is tracing a family history erased by the Holocaust. In his possession is a diary written by a relative in a labour camp during the Third Reich, and Charley must follow the threads leading from its haunting pages to his own present.

In New York an old man is found lying semiconscious on the pavement. There are no witnesses to what has happened to him and he has no form of identification. When he wakes up in a hospital bed he finds he doesn’t recognise the city or his own skin. In a state of total amnesia, he must embark on a struggle to regain his memory.

Richard Aronowitz was born in 1970 to an English father and a German-Jewish mother and grew up in rural Gloucestershire. He studied Modern Languages at Durham and Heidelberg universities and Art History at the Courtauld Institute in London. After working for Sotheby’s for several years, he joined the staff of the London Jewish Museum of Art. His poems have appeared in many magazines and are anthologised in Anvil New Poets 3, but Five Amber Beads is his first novel.