The History of Love

Name: The History of Love
ISBN: 9780393328622

A Novel

Nicole Krauss

EDWARD LEWIS WALLANT AWARD

Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive. But it wasn't always like this: in the Polish village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book...Sixty years later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old Alma, who was named after a character in that book, undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With virtuosic skill and soaring imaginative power, Nicole Krauss gradually draws these stories together toward a climax of "extraordinary depth and beauty" (Newsday).

“A significant novel, genuinely one of the year's best. Emotionally wrenching yet intellectually rigorous, idea-driven but with indelible characters and true suspense.” —New York

At least as heartbreaking as it is hilarious. —Washington Post

“Big, bold, twist-your-heart sad, kick-your-heels joyful—Nicole Krauss's brilliant novel is as deep and multifaceted as love itself.” —Marie Claire

“It's the sort of book that makes life bearable after all.” —Miami Herald

“Krauss writes like an angel.” —Guardian

“One of the most passionate vindications of the written word in recent fiction. It takes one's breath away.” —Spectator

“Vertiginously exciting...Beyond the vigorous whiplash that keeps The History of Love moving (and keeps its reader off balance until a stunning finale), this novel is tightly packed with ingenious asides...Even at their most oddball, these flourishes reflect the deep, surprising wisdom that gives this novel its ultimate heft.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times

“Nicole Krauss's gripping new voice doesn't work its way into the pantheon of American voices: it literally walks straight up to them and asks them to move over.” —Andre Aciman

“It restores your faith in fiction. It restores all sorts of faith.” —Ali Smith

About the Author

Nicole Krauss is an American novelist whose fiction explores Jewish memory, exile, and the ways loss and history shape identity. Born in New York City in 1974, she studied at Stanford and later at Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Her second novel, The History of Love (2005), follows an elderly Polish Jewish immigrant in New York and a lost manuscript that connects survivors and their descendants. It became an international bestseller, was translated into more than thirty languages, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. It also won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. Her next novel, Great House (2010), traces the legacy of a desk across generations, from Holocaust-era Europe to modern Jerusalem. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Forest Dark (2017) is set in Tel Aviv and the Judean desert and probes Jewish spirituality, inheritance, and the search for self. She has also published a story collection, To Be a Man (2023).

Krauss was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007 and one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” writers in 2010.