As ninety-six-year-old Harry Bernstein, author of the new book The Invisible Wall, shows, it’s never too late to write that book.

“I didn’t know what the heck to do with myself. … You know when you get into your nineties like I am, there’s nowhere else to think except the past. There’s no future to think about. There’s very little present,” says Bernstein, who gets around his New Jersey house slowly, with the aid of a cane, and is the sole survivor in his family.

“So you think of the past, particularly at nighttime when you’re lying in bed. And it all came back. So I began to write, and I was occupied, and it was really the best therapy I could have had.”

Bernstein first sent the finished manuscript to New York publishers but, having no luck, he sent it to the London office of Random House. There the book sat for about a year until it came across the desk of editor Kate Elton, who described it as “unputdownable.”

“I think he’s a most fantastic writer,” Elton said. “He creates the characters of his family so vividly and tells such a moving story.”

The book’s title refers to the barrier that divides Bernstein’s side of the street—the Jewish side—from the Christian side in his hometown of Stockport, near Manchester, a separation he likens to two enemy camps that have an uneasy truce. About the only thing that united the two sides of the street was poverty, with most people working in the mills on salaries that only allowed them to get by week to week.

“We understood we were not to involve ourselves with them, and they likewise with us. The Jewish boys and girls had their games on their side. They [the Christians] played their games on their side. It was two separate worlds,” Bernstein says.