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Riverhead
April 2014
On Sale: April 8, 2014
256 pages
ISBN: 1594633177
EAN: 9781594633171
Kindle: B00G3L6JY6
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
A profoundly searching new novel by a writer of incomparable
range, power, and achievement. In the winter of 1996, more than a hundred women and men of
diverse nationality, background, and belief gather at the
site of a former concentration camp for an unprecedented
purpose: a weeklong retreat during which they will offer
prayer and witness at the crematoria and meditate in all
weathers on the selection platform, while eating and
sleeping in the quarters of the Nazi officers who, half a
century before, sent more than a million Jews to their
deaths. Clements Olin, an American academic of Polish
descent, has come along, ostensibly to complete research on
the death of a survivor, even as he questions what a non-Jew
can contribute to the understanding of so monstrous a
catastrophe. As the days pass, tensions, both political and
personal, surface among the participants, stripping away any
easy pretense to healing or closure. Finding himself in the
grip of emotions and impulses of bewildering intensity, Olin
is forced to abandon his observer’s role and to embrace a
history his family has long suppressed—and with it the
yearnings and contradictions of being fully alive. In Paradise is a brave and deeply thought-provoking novel by
one of our most stunningly accomplished writers.
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