About the Book
A lost book reappears, drawing together the lives of the irrepressible Leo Gursky who has arrived at the end of his life, a locksmith searching for the son who’s never known him, and young Alma Singer, desperate to find her namesake and a cure for her mother’s loneliness. Gradually their stories merge into a single triumph of the imagination over loss.
Critics / Reviews
“Vertiginously exciting . . . vibrantly imagined. . . . [Krauss is] a prodigious talent.”
— Janet Maslin, New York Times
"At least as heartbreaking as it is hilarious."
— Washington Post
"Brilliant. An achievement of extraordinary depth and beauty."
— Newsday
"The novel’s achievement is precisely, and not negligibly, this: to have made a new fiction—alternately delightful and hilarious and deeply affecting."
— LA Weekly
"Moving and virtuosic."
— San Francisco Chronicle
"Luminous prose. . . . Krauss is a masterful storyteller . . . a writer of astonishing breadth."
— Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Ingenious."
— Entertainment Weekly
"A significant novel, genuinely one of the year’s best. Emotionally wrenching yet intellectually rigorous, idea-driven but with indelible characters and true suspense."
— New York
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Winners & Finalists