Boat of Stone

This absorbing Holocaust novel is based on a factual episode: the detention of 1580 German Jewish refugees in a British penal colony on the island of Mauritius, off Africa's east coast, after their deportation from Palestine in 1940. The story is told by a fictive survivor, Hanna Sommerfeld, a plucky, cantankerous, septuagenarian widow, now living in Israel with her lawyer son, Martin, who was born on Mauritius. Hanna's brooding husband, Daniel, did not survive the four-and-a-half-year internment, an ordeal rife with typhoid, floods and malnutrition. Shuttling between past and present, Hanna recalls their tortuous escape from Germany on an overcrowded freighter, her deep guilt over Daniel's death, and the hunger strike she led on Mauritius. Now in Haifa, she takes pride in her son and discusses the afterlife with her pregnant granddaughter Lara, who's seeing a reincarnation therapist. (In one especially moving scene, Hanna's mother, in a concentration camp in 1942, communicates telepathically with Hanna moments before she dies.) Earl ( Gulliver Quick ) interviewed survivors of the Mauritius camp in order to find in this little-known instance of cruelty a stirring tale of ultimate triumph. (Jan.)