Description
Book SynopsisFinalist for the 2010 National Book Award in FictionWinner of the 2011 ABA Indies Choice Honor Award in FictionWinner of the 2011 Anisfield-Wolf AwardShortlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize in Fiction A powerful, soaring novel about a stolen desk that contains the secrets, and becomes the obsession, of the lives it passes through.
Trade Review"One of America’s most important novelists and an international literary sensation." -- Sam Tanenhaus - New York Times Book Review
"[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 - Wall Street Journal
"Ambitious, disturbing, brave, provocative." -- Joan Frank - San Francisco Chronicle
"Sweeps you up…beautiful and mysterious." -- Ann Harleman - Boston Globe
"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 - NPR's Fresh Air
"Reminds us what it means to be alive." -- Rachel Rosenblit - Elle
"A novel brimming with insights into the human psyche…often haunting and ultimately rewarding." -- Monica Rhor - Associated Press
"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 - Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Exquisite…Krauss is a poetic stylist whose prose gives tremendous weight to her characters’ pain and struggles." -- Sharon Dilworth - Philadelphia Inquirer
"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." -- The Atlantic
"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 - Huffington Post
"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." -- Booklist (starred review)
"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 - Los Angeles Times
