Overview

Somewhere Else begins in 1906, when five year old Rosa Roshkin survives a pogrom in Poland and is uprooted with little more than a suitcase and her father’s violin. She is brought to Scotland and adopted in Edinburgh by Dr Max Solomon and his wife Nora, a childless Jewish couple trying to live quietly among their neighbours. Next door are the Mackintosh boys, William and Rory, and as Rosa grows the two families become tangled for decades. We follow love, grief, and hard choices through the First World War and the Second, through Kindertransport arrival, through medicine and motherhood, and into later reckonings shaped by Israel, Europe, and shifting borders. The book keeps returning to the same question, what counts as home when your first home was taken.

Writing & Voice

We found the writing spare and controlled. The sentences stay close to daily life, rooms, streets, meals, and small moments that carry big fear underneath. We liked how Edinburgh is drawn as lived space rather than postcard. We also felt the rhythm of years passing, with scenes that land sharply and then move on, as if the characters have no choice but to keep going.

Content & Perspective

We sit with women’s lives across a century, not as symbols, but as bodies and minds shaped by work, marriage, pregnancy, loss, and duty. We watch Rosa carry early trauma without tidy release, and we watch the next generation try to claim different futures. We also see how a community can be both shelter and pressure, and how being Jewish in Scotland can mean belonging and distance at the same time.

Themes

The novel explores displacement, assimilation, and the cost of survival. We keep coming back to how violence travels forward, even when the house looks stable. We see the pull of faith and culture, the push of prejudice, and the way wars and politics reach into private rooms. Under it all is the stubborn need to make a life where we are, even when part of us stays elsewhere.

What Worked

• A long time span that stays grounded in family life and consequence.
• A clear Edinburgh centre that holds the story steady as the world changes.
• Unsentimental feeling that lets love and harm sit side by side.

Minor Quibbles

• Some time jumps move quickly, and we wanted a little more space inside certain turning points.
• A few later threads feel crowded beside the strongest early and mid century sections.

Final Thoughts

We kept thinking how a single house can look safe, while the world keeps knocking at the door with its history.

Rating: ★★★★★ / 5