Krauss’s third novel, rapturously received by critics, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book. Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss. Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss. Told by five separate first-person narrators, American author Nicole Krauss’s novel Great House (2010) weaves many characters’ histories into the story of an antique desk, which as it changes hands becomes a symbol of loss and dislocation. Great House is a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children and how do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change? As the narrators of Great House make their confessions, the desk takes on more and more meaning, and comes finally to stand for all that has been taken from them, and all that binds them to what has disappeared. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father's study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944.Ĭonnecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. This brain-stretching novel travels back and forth across years and continents. Great House is a smart, serious, sharply written novel of great care and yearning. 1, 2010 A many-drawered writing desk resonates powerfully but for different reasons with the various characters in this novel about loss and retrieval from Krauss ( The History of Love, 2005, etc.). Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. GREAT HOUSE by Nicole Krauss RELEASE DATE: Oct. For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet's secret police one day a girl claiming to be the poet's daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer's life reeling. Great House by Nicole Krauss eBook Details.