Great House
ABOUT
THE BOOK
For twenty-five 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.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Chosen by our readers. With honed wit and masterly dialogue, the author rages against that most endearing of Dutch characteristics – the Protestant work ethic – when it is manipulated and abused by hypocritical wheelers and dealers. Great House challenges us to understand loss as both personal and historical. The novel connects – in complex and surprising ways – the stories of characters shattered by the past.