Great House

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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 10/05/2010
ISBN: 9780393079982
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.40w x 1.00d
Award: National Book Awards - Finalist
Award: Indies Choice Book Awards - Finalist
Award: Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction - Nominee

Review Citations: Library Journal Prepub Alert 05/15/2010 pg. 60
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2010
Library Journal 08/01/2010 pg. 69
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/05/2010 pg. 29
Publishers Weekly 08/09/2010
Booklist 09/01/2010 pg. 40
Entertainment Weekly 10/08/2010 pg. 76
People Weekly 10/18/2010 pg. 51
New York Times Book Review 10/17/2010 pg. 1
New York Times Book Review 10/24/2010 pg. 26
Christian Century 12/14/2010 pg. 25
Booklist Editors Choice/Adult 01/01/2011 pg. 8