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From National Book Award finalist Jennifer
Egan, author of Look at Me (“Brilliantly unnerving
. . . A haunting, sharp, splendidly articulate novel”
—The New York Times), a spellbinding work of
literary suspense enacted in a chilling psychological landscape—a
dazzling tour de force.
Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a
childhood prank whose devastating consequences changed both
their lives, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval
castle in Eastern Europe, a castle steeped in blood lore and
family pride. Built over a secret system of caves and tunnels,
the castle and its violent history invoke and subvert all
the elements of a gothic past: twins, a pool, an old baroness,
a fearsome tower. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut
off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event
of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as
the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner,
in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story—a
story about two cousins who unite to renovate a castle—that
brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.
Egan’s relentlessly gripping page-turner
plays with rich forms—ghost story, love story, gothic—and
transfixing themes: the undertow of history, the fate of imagination
in the cacophony of modern life, the uncanny likeness between
communications technology and the supernatural. In a narrative
that shifts seamlessly from an ancient European castle to
a maximum security prison, Egan conjures a world from which
escape is impossible and where the keep—the last stand,
the final holdout, the place you run to when the walls are
breached—is both everything worth protecting and the
very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive.
A novel of fierce intelligence and velocity;
a bravura performance from a writer of consummate skill and
style.
Jennifer Egan is the author of Look
at Me, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book
Award, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection
Emerald City. Her nonfiction appears frequently in
The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her family
in Brooklyn, New York.
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