The History of Love: A Novel

A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son, and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.

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."

"Vertiginously exciting." --New York Times

"At least as heartbreaking as it is hilarious." --Washington Post

"Krauss writers like an angel." --Guardian

"One of the most passionate vindications of the written word in recent fiction. It takes one's breath away." --Spectator

"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." --Miami Herald


Nicole Krauss has been hailed by the New York Times as "one of America's most important novelists." She is the author of the international bestseller Great House, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Man Walks Into a Room. Her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages.