Great House: A Novel (Paperback)
October 2010 Indie Next List
“The best books haunt and sometimes confuse you. They will make you think, feel, wonder, go back to earlier chapters, and finally, fully experience the story being told. Nicole Krauss's new book does just that and more. This powerful novel contains multiple stories of loves lost, families torn apart, and secrets kept and revealed. The suffering of many in Nazi Germany, in Pinochet's Chile, and those seeking a new life in Israel are woven together by the narrative thread of a stolen desk. This is a powerful book that will leave you reeling.”
— Ellen Burns, Books on the Common, Ridgefield, CT
Summer 2012 Reading Group
“The best books haunt and sometimes confuse you. They will make you think, feel, wonder, go back to earlier chapters, and finally, fully experience the story being told. Nicole Krauss's new book does just that and more. This powerful novel contains multiple stories of loves lost, families torn apart, and secrets kept and revealed. The suffering of many in Nazi Germany, in Pinochet's Chile, and those seeking a new life in Israel are woven together by the narrative thread of a stolen desk. This is a powerful book that will leave you reeling.”
— Ellen Burns, Books On The Common, Ridgefield, CT
Description
New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the National Book Award • Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award • A Best Book of the Year as chosen by the New York Times (Notable), Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic, St. Louis Post Dispatch, The Oregonian, and Book Page.
"Masterful…Evocative and moving." —NPR
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
About the Author
Nicole Krauss has been hailed by the New York Times as "one of America’s most important novelists." She is the author of Man Walks Into a Room, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year; The History of Love, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Saroyan Prize for International Literature; Great House, a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award; Forest Dark; and most recently, To Be a Man: Stories. In 2007 she was selected as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, and in 2010 she was chosen for the New Yorker’s ‘Twenty Under Forty’ list. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-seven languages. Nicole Krauss lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Praise For…
One of America’s most important novelists and an international literary sensation.
— Sam Tanenhaus
[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
Ambitious, disturbing, brave, provocative.
— Joan Frank
Sweeps you up…beautiful and mysterious.
— Ann Harleman
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
Reminds us what it means to be alive.
— Rachel Rosenblit
A novel brimming with insights into the human psyche…often haunting and ultimately rewarding.
— Monica Rhor
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
Exquisite…Krauss is a poetic stylist whose prose gives tremendous weight to her characters’ pain and struggles.
— Sharon Dilworth
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.
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
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.
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
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