The History of Love

The History of Love – Nicole Krauss

Leo Gursky is an old man living alone in a small New York apartment, a retired locksmith who knocks over things in shops so that people will notice he is still alive. Long ago, as a young man in a Polish village, he fell in love with a girl named Alma and wrote a book for her called The History of Love. Then the war came, and everything was lost, or so he believes.

Across the city, fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to cure her widowed mother’s loneliness and to make sense of her own grief for her father. She was named after a character in a strange, obscure book that her parents loved, a book her mother has just been asked to translate by a mysterious stranger. Determined to discover the truth about the book and the woman she was named for, Alma sets out on a search that will lead her, in unexpected ways, toward Leo.

Moving between Poland, Chile and New York, and between past and present, Nicole Krauss’s novel weaves together several lives connected by a single lost manuscript, revealing how a book can travel across continents and decades to touch people its author never imagined.

Krauss writes with wit and tenderness, from Leo’s wry, aching voice to Alma’s lists and notebooks.

Funny, heartbreaking and luminous, The History of Love is an unforgettable story about memory, loss, the survival of love and the power of books to connect us across time, and a favorite of readers and book clubs around the world.