First published 2010
An American novelist has spent twenty-five years writing at a desk inherited from a Chilean poet who vanished under Pinochet's regime. When a young woman arrives claiming to be the poet's daughter and demanding the desk's return, the writer's ordered existence crumbles. Meanwhile, in London's suburbs, a man tends to his dying wife and discovers among her belongings a lock of hair that reveals a devastating secret from her past. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer painstakingly reconstructs his father's study, stolen piece by piece during the Nazi occupation of Budapest in 1944. The desk with many drawers moves between these lives, carrying the weight of loss and memory. Each person who owns it or loses it must confront what they inherit from the past and what they leave behind. As their stories converge, the desk becomes more than furniture. It holds the absence of those who disappeared and the presence of those who remain to remember them.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: America, Budapest, Chile, Jerusalem, London
Period: 1944, 1970s
289 pages · Hardcover · W. W. Norton & Company