Book of the Month–December 2011
Great House
By: Nicole Krauss
The four novellas in Great House are linked through a desk. Among the narrators is a reclusive novelist who inherited the desk from a Chilean poet who disappeared during Pinochet’s reign. Her life is shattered when a poet’s relative retrieves the desk. In London, another story is told by a man who makes a devastating discovery among his dying wife’s possession. An antiques dealer in Jerusalem encounters the desk as he tries to reassemble the study belonging to his father–a room that had been plundered by the Nazis in 1944 Budapest. As the narrators 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.
Also available as:
Large Print
Acknowledgements and Awards
2011 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
2010 National Book Award finalist
2011 Orange Prize finalist
Book Reviews
The Globe and Mail
The Guardian
New York Times
About The Author
Born in Manhattan, Krauss spent her childhood in Long Island, New York. She enrolled in Stanford University in 1992. During this time she was mentored by poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky. She also completed a master’s degreee in art history at Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute in London.
Her first novel, Man Walks into a Room was named the Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. A History of Love, published in 2005 won'the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, an award for the best foreign book published in France. In 2007, she was listed as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. In 2010, The New Yorker named her one of the 20 best writers under 40.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and their two children.
Author Interviews
Charlie Rose (video)
New York Times (audio)
The Observer
The Varsity
Read Alikes
If you liked Great House, you may also enjoy:
Other Books by Nicole Krauss
Man Walks into a Room
eBook
The History of Love
Audiobook
eAudiobook
Other Fiction
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
eAudiobook
Day for Night by Frederick Reiken
Invisible by Paul Auster
Large Print
Audiobook
Talking Book (restricted to Print Disabled patrons)
Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips
eAudiobook
Non-Fiction
The Dictator’s Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet by Heraldo Muñoz
The Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal
Objects of our Affection: Uncovering My Family’s Past, One Chair, Pistol and Pickle Fork at a Time by Lisa Tracy
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