Great House

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 (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Starred review from December 20, 2010
A writing desk serves as Krauss's literary device to connect five striking vignettes. So, too, are the characters emotionally linked through lives that involve writing and reading, love overshadowed by loss, and connection outweighed by isolation. The book is narrated at a stately pace—which will be appreciated by the serious listener who might wish to stop the audio to write down a line or two—by Robert Ian MacKenzie (narrator of McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street series) who demonstrates that he can do wonders with material he can sink his teeth into. His performance as a British professor married to a reclusive writer is a marvel, and Alma Cuervo's evocation of a lonely author haunted by her relationship to a previous owner of the desk is affecting and nuanced. Listeners who enjoy lingering over a top-notch novel will be intellectually nourished by this audio. A Norton hardcover.