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W. W. Norton & Company
October 2010
On Sale: October 5, 2010
248 pages ISBN: 0393079988 EAN: 9780393079982 Hardcover
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Fiction
A powerful, soaring novel about a stolen desk that contains
the secrets, and becomes the obsession, of the lives it
passes through. 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.
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