The History of Love: A Novel

Nicole Krauss

May 2006 · W. W. Norton & Company

About this ebook

ONE OF THE MOST LOVED NOVELS OF THE DECADE.

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" (Newsday).

Ratings and reviews

Kind of a spoiler*** I don't know how to feel about this book. The beginning started out fantastic. Then things got a tad confusing but I caught on. But in the end the book was extremely sad. There was no love in this book at all, aside from the love Leo always had for Alma. The was no love for the young Alma, I no longer heard about her best friend who I know she loved. No new love for Almas sad mother who lost her husband. And no new love for Leo who lost everything he did love in life, including at a young age his best friend "Bruno". I also never understood who sent the letter? Issac? I just felt so incomplete at the end. And I felt so sad it was all so heartbreaking in the end there was no love in the History of Love. 😢

This is one of the most affecting books I have read in a very long time. Its ideas are so tangled you can't pin it down in a review. And yet, however overwhelming the book may be, it is nevertheless perfectly clear and effective. By the end of the reading you're left with this great indefinite melancholy, this feeling that you've learned some great supra-linguistic truth that you can't define.

Had to read this for literature class. One of the few books I'm glad I HAD to read! It's written amazingly, I can actually read without getting bored and the story is so original and keeps you on your toes. It has one of the prettiest endings of all. If you like when stories flip and flop between characters, multiple points of view, history and good old romance, than this book is it!

About the author

Nicole Krauss has been hailed by the New York Times as "one of America’s most important novelists." She is the author of Man Walks Into a Room, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year; The History of Love, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Saroyan Prize for International Literature; Great House, a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award; Forest Dark; and most recently, To Be a Man: Stories. In 2007 she was selected as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, and in 2010 she was chosen for the New Yorker’s ‘Twenty Under Forty’ list. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-seven languages. Nicole Krauss lives in Brooklyn, New York.