NOVEMBER 2010 - AudioFile
A battered wooden desk and the lives it touches form the link between characters in this engrossing exploration of life and loss, memory and guilt, Jewish culture and history, and the tenuousness of emotional connections. Perfect for audio, GREAT HOUSE employs talented narrators who endow each of the main characters with human fallibility, giving credibility to their fears, moments of cruelty, selfish hopes, and flashes of selflessness. Nadia borrows the desk from a young poet who disappears in Chile during the Pinochet regime. He got the desk from Lotte, a woman with a terrible secret. George Weisz spends his life reclaiming belongings seized from Jews by the Nazis during WWII. Beautifully read and artfully written, Krauss’s every sentence wraps itself around the heart. Prepare to be mesmerized. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
Huffington Post - Janet Byrne
"A complex, richly imagined new novel… Krauss’s talent runs deep. And she cannot write a bad sentence: pound for pound, the sentences alone deliver epiphany upon epiphany."
Jewcy.com - Juliet Linderman
"Krauss’ third novel…is perhaps even more indicative [than The History of Love] of her ability to weave intricate storylines, craft emotionally layered characters and expertly draw out the pain, difficulty, and extreme complexity of human relationships."
The Denver Post - Robin Vidimos
"Steeped in place and memory, Great House is a worthy successor to Krauss’ earlier works, more complex and more challenging."
The San Francisco Chronicle - Joan Frank
"While her prior, much-vaunted novel, The History of Love, was certainly fresh and winning, Great House strikes me as a richer, more seasoned exploration of the themes and images that bedevil Krauss… Krauss’ sentences are so beautiful, rendered in such simple, clear language, I had to stop to reread many."
The Philadelphia Inquirer - Sharon Dilworth
"Exquisite…Krauss is a poetic stylist whose prose gives tremendous weight to her characters’ pain and struggles."
TheAtlantic.com - Jennie Rothenberg Gritz
"Krauss has a unique way of assembling novels—baroque, complex, and with stunning tidiness that isn’t clear until the very last page. All the parts do fit together in the end. The shape they form is the ghastly Great House, and its walls are ideas that leave the reader reverberating."
The Cleveland Plain Dealer - Karen R. Long
"Krauss’ organic scenes soar, she is stunning."
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Mike Fischer
"[A] brave new novel…[Krauss] has written one of the most lyrical novels I’ve read in a long time."
Fresh Air, NPR - Maureen Corrigan
"Krauss herself is a fiction pioneer, toying with fresh ways of rendering experience and emotion, giving us readers the thrill of seeing the novel stretched into amorphous new shapes."
Book Page
"Surely if there is one book each author is meant to write, then there might also be one book each reader is meant to read. For plenty of fans out there, Great House just might be that book."
The Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks
"[Krauss] writes of her characters’ despair with striking lucidity…an eloquent dramatization of the need to find that missing piece that will give life its meaning."
Booklist
"Starred Review: Krauss’ masterful rendition of character is breathtaking, compelling.... This tour de force of fiction writing will deeply satisfy fans of the author’s first two books and bring her legions more."
The Boston Globe - Ann Harleman
"[The characters’] stunningly distinct and lively voices hold us captive to their versions of their lives. Krauss, who began her career as a poet, can do just about anything with the English language."
Jewish Week - Sandee Brawarsky
"With grace and originality, Krauss writes of loss and many kinds of loneliness, the connections between memory and objects, between memory and identity, and about uncertainty."
Andrea Barrett
"…I was captivated by the first chapter, and never disappointed thereafter as the various voices chimed in and the intricate connections began to connect. Perhaps it has a special resonance for writers (the two "All Rise" sections in particular, were utterly devastating)—but at the same time I feel sure all kinds of readers will respond to it.... The richness of invention, the beauty of the prose, the aptness of her central images (oh, the desk!), the depth of feeling: who would not be moved?"
Elle - Rachel Rosenblit
"The most heartbreaking part of Great House, the third novel by Nicole Krauss, is having to finish it…As the mysteries of this beautifully written novel come spooling out, you’ll marvel at how profoundly one brilliantly crafted metaphor involving a mute wooden artifact can remind us what it means to be alive."
Associated Press - Monica Rhor
"A novel brimming with insights into the human psyche…often haunting and ultimately rewarding."
The New York Times Book Review - Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
"[An] elegiac novel…achieved through exquisitely chosen sensory details that reverberate with emotional intensity. Here [Krauss] gives us her tragic vision pure. It is a high-wire performance, only the wire has been replaced by an exposed nerve, and you hold your breath, and she does not fall."
New York Press - Yevgeniya Traps
"Artlessly lovely… the pleasure of reading this book is in its details, its intimation of sincerity, its quiet wisdom."
NOVEMBER 2010 - AudioFile
A battered wooden desk and the lives it touches form the link between characters in this engrossing exploration of life and loss, memory and guilt, Jewish culture and history, and the tenuousness of emotional connections. Perfect for audio, GREAT HOUSE employs talented narrators who endow each of the main characters with human fallibility, giving credibility to their fears, moments of cruelty, selfish hopes, and flashes of selflessness. Nadia borrows the desk from a young poet who disappears in Chile during the Pinochet regime. He got the desk from Lotte, a woman with a terrible secret. George Weisz spends his life reclaiming belongings seized from Jews by the Nazis during WWII. Beautifully read and artfully written, Krauss’s every sentence wraps itself around the heart. Prepare to be mesmerized. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
