The History of Love

　　The illuminating national bestseller: "Vertiginouslyexciting…vibrantly imagined….[Krauss is] a prodigioustalent."—Janet Maslin, New York Times
　　A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old mansearching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowedmother's loneliness.
　　Leo Gursky is just about surviving, tapping his radiator eachevening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive. Butlife wasn't always like this: sixty years ago, in the Polishvillage where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. Andthough Leo doesn't know it, that book survived, inspiring fabulouscircumstances, even love. Fourteen-year-old Alma was named after acharacter in that very book. And although she has her handsfull—keeping track of her brother, Bird (who thinks he might be theMessiah), and taking copious notes on How to Survive in theWild—she undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save herfamily. With consummate, spellbinding skill, Nicole Kraussgradually draws together their stories.
　　This extraordinary book was inspired by the author's fourgrandparents and by a pantheon of authors whose work is haunted byloss—Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, and more. It is trulya history of love: a tale brimming with laughter, irony, passion,and soaring imaginative power.