From the Back Cover
Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's loneliness. Believing she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author. Across New York an old man called Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer.
About the Author
Nicole Krauss was born in New York in 1974. Her first novel Man Walks into a Room, to be published by Penguin in 2006, was shortlisted for the LA Times Book Award. She lives in Brooklyn.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
As a child my mother and my aunts used to tell me that I would grow up to become handsome. It was clear to me that I wasn t anything to look at then, but I believed that some measure of beauty might come to me eventually. I don t know what I thought: that my ears, which stuck out at an undignified angle, would recede, that my head would somehow grow to fit them? That my hair, not unlike a toilet brush in texture, would, with time, unkink itself and reflect light? That my face which held so little promise eyelids as heavy as a frog s, lips on the thin side would somehow transform into something not regrettable? For years I would wake up in the morning and go to the mirror, hoping. Even when I was too old to continue hoping, I still did. I grew older and there was no improvement. The year of my Bar Mitzvah I was visited by a plague of acne that stayed four years. As soon as the acne cleared my hairline began to recede, as if it wanted to disassociate itself from the embarrassment of my face. My ears, pleased with the new attention they now enjoyed, seemed to strain further into the spotlight
