Charlie St. Cloud is a small-town hero and an accomplished sailor who has it all: the adoration of his mother and younger brother and a Stanford scholarship. His bright future is cut short when tragedy strikes and takes his dreams with it. Now Charlie is torn between honoring a promise he made years ago and pursuing his newfound love with a former high school classmate.

Amalia and Gad, sister and brother, have been bequeathed a terrible honor: to be caretakers of a cemetery of Jewish martyrs set on an isolated mountaintop in turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe. The siblings accept this daunting privilege only to battle their fierce loneliness, wavering piety, and a burgeoning lust they feel for each other. In Unto the Soul, Aharon Appelfeld once again explores the sustenance of faith in the wake of tremulous guilt...