Great House

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

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

“[Krauss] writes of her characters' despair with striking lucidity...an eloquent dramatization of the need to find that missing piece that will give life its meaning.” —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“A complex, richly imagined new novel...Krauss's talent runs deep. And she cannot write a bad sentence: pound for pound, the sentences alone deliver epiphany upon epiphany.” —Janet Byrne, Huffington Post

“A novel brimming with insights into the human psyche...often haunting and ultimately rewarding.” —Monica Rhor, Associated Press

“Although most of her characters are prisoners of the past, Krauss herself is a fiction pioneer, toying with fresh ways of rendering experience and emotion, giving us readers the thrill of seeing the novel stretched into amorphous new shapes.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

“Ambitious, disturbing, brave, provocative.” —Joan Frank, San Francisco Chronicle

“Delayed revelation is one of the author's signatures, and in this, her third novel, she manages it with satisfying élan...Krauss's organic scenes soar, she is stunning.” —Karen R. Long, Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Exquisite...Krauss is a poetic stylist whose prose gives tremendous weight to her characters' pain and struggles.” —Sharon Dilworth, Philadelphia Inquirer

“Full of cogent insights...an exercise in kaleidoscopic storytelling, a novel that seeks to weave four groups of characters into a larger meditation on memory and loss.” —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“Krauss has a unique way of assembling novels—baroque, complex, and with stunning tidiness that isn't clear until the very last page. All the parts do fit together in the end. The shape they form is the ghastly Great House, and its walls are ideas that leave the reader reverberating.” —The Atlantic

“Krauss' masterful rendition of character is breathtaking, compelling.... This tour de force of fiction writing will deeply satisfy fans of the author's first two books and bring her legions more.” —Booklist (starred review)

“One of America's most important novelists and an international literary sensation.” —Sam Tanenhaus, New York Times Book Review

“Reminds us what it means to be alive.” —Rachel Rosenblit Elle

“Sweeps you up...beautiful and mysterious.” —Ann Harleman, Boston Globe

“Stunning...I was captivated by the first chapter and never disappointed thereafter. The richness of invention, the beauty of the prose, the aptness of her central images, the depth of feeling: who would not be moved?” —Andrea Barrett