The History of Love

Author: Nicole Krauss

List Price: $23.95

Pages: 252

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (May 2, 2005) 

Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.0

ISBN: 0393060349  

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 radiator¹ 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 fabulous² 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 copious³ notes on How to Survive in the Wild-she undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With consummate⁴, 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, irony⁵, passion, and soaring imaginative power.