The House of Twenty Thousand Books

The title alone has an aspirational allure (at least for book hoarders like me), but the book inside is even better: it's a beautiful, subtle, and knowledgeable portrait of a singular man, Chimen Abramsky, by his adoring (but not blindly so) grandson, constructed ingeniously as a tour through the crammed rooms of Chimen and his wife Mimi's ramshackle London home. As a private library with unmatched riches in Socialist and Jewish history and a humble, spirited salon for some of the city's most contentious thinkers, their home embodied the history of Jewish intellect and exile as well as the lost and soured dreams of Communist utopia. Recommended especially for any fan of The Hare with Amber Eyes or The Woman in Gold.