The World to Come
Books / Hardcover
Books › Fiction › Thrillers › Suspense
ISBN: 0393051072 / Publisher: W. W. Norton, January 2006
Having stolen a million-dollar Marc Chagall masterpiece, thirty-year-old quiz-show writer Benjamin Ziskind and his twin sister work to evade the police and evaluate the eighty-year-old link between their family and the famous painting.
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By the winner of three national awards, a daring, ambitious, and wildly readable novel.A million-dollar painting by Marc Chagall is stolen from a museum. The unlikely thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a thirty-year-old quiz-show writer. As Benjamin and his twin sister try to evade the police, they find themselves recalling their dead parentsthe father who lost a leg in Vietnam, the mother who created children's booksand their stories about trust, loss, and betrayal.What is true, what is fake, what does it mean? Eighty years before the theft, these questions haunted Chagall and the enigmatic Yiddish fabulist Der Nister ("The Hidden One"), teachers at a school for Jewish orphans. Both the painting and the questions will travel through time to shape the Ziskinds' futures.With astonishing grace and simplicity, Dara Horn interweaves a real art heist, history, biography, theology, and Yiddish literature. Richly satisfying, utterly unique, her novel opens the door to "the world to come"not life after death, but the world we create through our actions right now.
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