Great House: A NovelNew York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the National Book Award • Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award • A Best Book of the Year as chosen by the New York Times (Notable), Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic, St. Louis Post Dispatch, The Oregonian, and Book Page. For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet’s daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer’s life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944. Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. As the narrators of Great House make their confessions, the desk takes on more and more meaning, and comes finally to stand for all that has been taken from them, and all that binds them to what has disappeared. Great House is a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children and how do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change? Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss. "This is a novel about the long journey of a magnificent desk as it travels through the twentieth century from one owner to the next. It is also a novel about love, exile, the defilements of war, and the restorative power of language." —National Book Award citation |
From inside the book
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... child . It was empty , and all the walls were painted a bluish white . The whole effect was very peaceful , Paul said , and in the dream he thought Vallejo lucky to be able to go to such a place to work . This looks like the holding ...
... children sleeping pills in their tea . The boy was nine and his sister was eleven . Once they were asleep , she carried ... child . From the beginning both of us had imagined that we would . But there were always things we felt we had to ...
... child could expire without my explicit agreement . In the taxi home that night I continued to think about that mother and her children . The wheels of the car softly rolling over the pine needles on the forest floor , the engine cut in ...
... children's voices seemed to get noisier . I could never tell whether it was because in the failing light the city had grown a decibel more quiet , or because the children had really grown louder ... child's cry that tore into 30 Great House.
Nicole Krauss. pained and terrified, an agonizing child's cry that tore into me, as if it were an appeal to me alone. I stopped short and jerked around, sure I was going to find a mangled child fallen from a great height. But there was ...