Newly engaged and unthinkingly self-satisfied, twenty-eight-year-old lawyer Adam Newman is the prize catch of Temple Fortune, a small suburb in North West London. He has been with Rachel Gilbert since they were both sixteen and now, to the relief and happiness of the entire Gilbert family, they are finally to marry. To Adam, Rachel embodies the highest values of Temple Fortune: she is innocent, conventional, and entirely secure in her community–a place in which everyone still knows the whereabouts of their nursery school classmates. Marrying Rachel will cement Adam’s role in a warm, inclusive family he loves; her grandmother Ziva, a Holocaust survivor who passes irreverent and sharp-witted judgment on the suburban preoccupations of Temple Fortune; her father, Lawrence, who is Adam’s boss and whom he idolizes; and her Israeli mother, Jaffa, who is as broad as her husband is tall and runs the family with energy and unquestioned authority.  But as the vast machinery of the wedding gathers momentum, Adam feels the first faint touches of claustrophobia, and when Rachel’s younger cousin, Ellie Schneider, moves home from New York she unsettles Adam more than he’d care to admit. Ellie, beautiful, vulnerable, and fiercely independent, offers liberation that he hadn’t known existed: a freedom from the loving interference and frustrating parochialism of North West London. Adam finds himself questioning everything, suddenly torn between security and exhilaration; tradition and independence. What might he be missing by staying close to home?  The Innocents is a triumphant and beautifully executed recasting of The Age of Innocence, set in contemporary London’s tight-knit Jewish community.