| Great House | |
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1st edition |
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| Author(s) | Nicole Krauss |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | W.W. Norton & Company |
| Publication date | October 12, 2010 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) and E-Book |
| Pages | 289 pg (paperback) |
| ISBN | 9780393079982 |
Great House is the third novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss, published on October 12, 2010 by W. W. Norton & Company. Early versions of the first chapter were published in Harper's ("From the Desk of Daniel Varsky", 2007),[1] Best American Short Stories 2008, and The New Yorker ("The Young Painters", June 2010). Great House was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Fiction.
Contents |
For 25 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?
The book's title, Great House, is the name by which the yeshiva in Yavne, founded by the first-century rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, became known after his death. Its source is this passage from the Bible, in the Second Book of Kings, chapter 25, verse 9: "He burned the house of God, the king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem; even every great house he burned with fire."
Part I
Part II
"Your Honor, in the winter of 1972 R and I broke up, or I should say he broke up with me."
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