The History of Love - Softcover

" Vertiginously exciting... Beyond the vigorous whiplash that keeps ?The History of Love ?moving (and keeps its reader off balance until a stunning finale), this novel is tightly packed with ingenious asides... Even at their most oddball, these flourishes reflect the deep, surprising wisdom that gives this novel its ultimate heft. " -- Janet Maslin " The novel's achievement is precisely this: to have made a new fiction-alternately delightful and hilarious and deeply affecting. " -- Claire Messud "At least as heartbreaking as it is hilarious." " Krauss writes like an angel. " "One of the most passionate vindications of the written word in recent fiction. It takes one's breath away." "It restores your faith in fiction. It restores all sorts of faith." -- Ali Smith "It's the sort of book that makes life bearable after all." " Nicole Krauss's Leo Gursky is all voice-frisky, aching, jittery, stunning, heart-rending, irresistible. There's nothing like his voice, nor will there ever be. A cross between I.B. Singer and Woody Allen, Kafka and Leopold Bloom, [it] doesn't just work its way into the pantheon of American voices: it literally walks straight up to them and asks them to move over-or else it will haunt their living days and nights. And it does just that. " -- Andre Aciman "A significant novel, genuinely one of the year's best. Emotionally wrenching yet intellectually rigorous, idea-driven but with indelible characters and true suspense."

Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive. But it wasn't always like this: in the Polish village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book...Sixty years later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old Alma, who was named after a character in that book, undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With virtuosic skill and soaring imaginative power, Nicole Krauss gradually draws these stories together toward a climax of "extraordinary depth and beauty" (Newsday).