Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss. 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? 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. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944.Ĭonnecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. 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. As he gets older, he keeps trying to find her, writing a book. She left him when they were both living in Poland during World War II. The History of Love is a story about a boy named Leo Gursky, who is searching for the lost love of his life, Alma Mereminski. Shortlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize in Fictionįor 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. Everything you need to know about Nicole Krauss's The History of Love, in 1 paragraph. Winner of the 2011 ABA Indies Choice Honor Award in Fiction Finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Fiction
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