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The History of Love

　　The illuminating national bestseller: ”Vertiginously exciting…vibrantly imagined….[Krauss is] a prodigious talent.”—Janet Maslin, New York Times

　　A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother’s loneliness.

　　Leo Gursky is just about surviving, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he’s still alive. But life wasn’t always like this: sixty years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. And though Leo doesn’t know it, that book survived, inspiring fabulous circumstances, even love. Fourteen-year-old Alma was named after a character in that very book. And although she has her hands full—keeping track of her brother, Bird (who thinks he might be the Messiah), and taking copious notes on How to Survive in the Wild—she undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With consummate, spellbinding skill, Nicole Krauss gradually draws together their stories.

　　This extraordinary book was inspired by the author’s four grandparents and by a pantheon of authors whose work is haunted by loss—Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, and more. It is truly a history of love: a tale brimming with laughter, irony, passion, and soaring imaginative power.

Vogue

Confirms the depth and breadth of her talent.

Newsday

Brilliant. An achievement of extraordinary depth and beauty.

LA Weekly

The novel’s achievement is precisely, not negligibly, this: to have made a new fiction—alternately delightful and hilarious and deeply affecting.

San Francisco Chronicle

Moving and virtuosic.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Luminous prose….Krauss is a masterful storyteller…a writer of astonishing breadth.

Entertainment Weekly

Ingenious.

New York

A significant novel, genuinely one of the year’s best.

Miami Herald, Connie Ogle

Wonderful and haunting....Deftly layered …with deceptively nimble humor and unsentimental tenderness.

Boris Kachka, New York Magazine

Emotionally wrenching yet intellectually rigorous, idea-driven but with indelible characters and true suspense.

Seattle Times, Mary Brennan

A complex, funny, sad, elegantly constructed meditation on the power of love, language and imagination.

作者簡介

　　Nicole Krauss is the author of the novel Man Walks into a Room. Her work has appeared most recently in The New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.