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A novel of fierce intelligence and velocity; a bravura performance from a writer of consummate skill and style.
Knopf
August 2006
256 pages
ISBN: 1400043921
EAN: 9781400043927
Hardcover
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Fiction
From National Book Award finalist Jennifer Egan, author of
Look at Me (“Brilliantly unnerving . . . A haunting, sharp,
splendidly articulate novel” —The New York Times), a
spellbinding work of literary suspense enacted in a chilling
psychological landscape—a dazzling tour de force. Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank whose
devastating consequences changed both their lives, reunite
twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern
Europe, a castle steeped in blood lore and family pride.
Built over a secret system of caves and tunnels, the castle
and its violent history invoke and subvert all the elements
of a gothic past: twins, a pool, an old baroness, a fearsome
tower. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from
the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their
youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full
horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for
an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story—a story
about two cousins who unite to renovate a castle—that brings
the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation. Egan’s relentlessly gripping page-turner plays with rich
forms—ghost story, love story, gothic—and transfixing
themes: the undertow of history, the fate of imagination in
the cacophony of modern life, the uncanny likeness between
communications technology and the supernatural. In a
narrative that shifts seamlessly from an ancient European
castle to a maximum security prison, Egan conjures a world
from which escape is impossible and where the keep—the last
stand, the final holdout, the place you run to when the
walls are breached—is both everything worth protecting and
the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive. A novel of fierce intelligence and velocity; a bravura
performance from a writer of consummate skill and style.
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