The World To Come

Name: The World To Come
ISBN: 9780393329063

A Novel

Dara Horn

WINNER OF THE HAROLD U. RIBALOW PRIZE

A million-dollar Chagall is stolen from a museum during a singles' cocktail hour. The unlikely thief, former child prodigy Benjamin Ziskind, is convinced that the painting once hung in his parents' living room. This work of art opens a door through which we discover his family's startling history—from an orphanage in Soviet Russia where Chagall taught to suburban New Jersey and the jungles of Vietnam.

"Nothing short of amazing." —Entertainment Weekly

“A deeply satisfying literary mystery and a funny-sad meditation on how the past haunts the present—and how we haunt the future.” Lev Grossman, Time

“Brilliantly imagined.” —Merle Rubin, Wall Street Journal

“Deeply sympathetic characters, an encyclopedic grasp of 20th-century history and a spiritual sense that sees through the conventional barriers between this life and the one to come—or the one before.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post

“Horn's deft touch is often wryly funny--but never maliciously so...An accomplished work that beautifully explains how families—in all their maddening, smothering, supportive glory—create us.” —Natalie Danford, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Symphonic and piercingly beautiful...the novel suspends us between emotions, never allowing any to become predominant, and we hang there in that indeterminate space, perfectly happy, hoping that the book will never end.” —Bethany Scneider, Newsday

“This book is the real thing.” —Julia Livshin, Chicago Tribune

About the Author

Dara Horn is an acclaimed American novelist and scholar whose fiction explores Jewish history, memory, and the stories people inherit and reinvent. She holds a PhD in Hebrew and Yiddish literature from Harvard University and has taught Jewish literature and Israeli culture at Harvard and Sarah Lawrence College.

Her debut novel, In the Image (2002), was followed by The World to Come (2006), All Other Nights (2009), A Guide for the Perplexed (2013), and Eternal Life (2018). Her novels range from a Chagall-inspired mystery involving a stolen painting, to the story of a Jewish Union spy during the Civil War, to an immortal woman who has lived through millennia of Jewish history. Her work often draws on rabbinic tradition, lost Jewish texts, and the long arc of Jewish survival.

Horn has received the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Granta named her one of the Best Young American Novelists. Her nonfiction book People Love Dead Jews (2021), a collection of essays on how the world engages with Jewish history and antisemitism, was a bestseller. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Smithsonian. She lives in New Jersey with her family.