Great House

Summary

For twenty-five years, a solitary American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police; one day a girl claiming to be his daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer’s life reeling. Across the ocean in London, a man discovers a terrifying secret about his wife of almost fifty years. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer is slowly reassembling his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis from Budapest in 1944.

These worlds are anchored and connected by a desk of enormous dimension and many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or give it away. As the four narrators of Great House tell their stories, the desk is infused with further layers of meaning and comes finally to stand for all that has disappeared in the chaos of the world—children, parents, whole peoples and civilizations.

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?

Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss.