About the Author

Dara Horn is the author of five acclaimed and award-winning novels. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.

Reviews

Following up her multi-award-winning In the Image, Horn toots a complex story of thirtyish quiz-show writer Benjamin Ziskind's theft of a Chagall painting-and the artist's struggle with issues of truth and representation. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Former child prodigy Ben Ziskind-5'6", 123 pounds and legally blind-steals a Marc Chagall painting at the end of an alienating singles cocktail hour at a local museum, determined to prove that its provenance is tainted and that it belongs to his family. With surety and accomplishment, Horn (In the Image) telescopes out into Ziskind's familial history through an exploration of Chagall's life; that of Chagall's friend the Yiddish novelist Der Nister; 1920s Soviet Russia and its horrific toll on Russian Jews; the nullifying brutality of Vietnam (where Ben's father, Daniel, served a short, terrifying stint); and the paradoxes of American suburbia, a place where native Ben feels less at home than the teenage Soviet refugee Leonid Shcharansky. Ben's relationship with his pregnant twin sister, Sara, a painter who eventually tries to render a forgery of the painting to return to the museum, is a damply compelling exposition of what it means to have someone biologically close but emotionally distant. Horn, born in 1977, expertly handles subplots and digressions, neatly bringing in everything from Yiddish lore to Nebuchadnezzar, Da Nang, the Venice Biennale, recent theories of child development, brutal Soviet politics and Daniel's job as a writer for fictional TV show American Genius. Characters like Erica Frank, of the Museum of Hebraic Art, give tart glimpses into still-claustrophobic Goodbye, Columbus territory, which Horn then unites with a much grander place that furnishes the book's title. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

"A deeply satisfying literary mystery and a funny-sad meditation on how the past haunts the present-and how we haunt the future." -- Lev Grossman - Time
"Brilliantly imagined." -- Merle Rubin - Wall Street Journal
"Symphonic and piercingly beautiful...the novel suspends us between emotions, never allowing any to become predominant, and we hang there in that indeterminate space, perfectly happy, hoping that the book will never end." -- Bethany Scneider - Newsday
"Horn's deft touch is often wryly funny-but never maliciously so...An accomplished work that beautifully explains how families-in all their maddening, smothering, supportive glory-create us." -- Natalie Danford - Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Deeply sympathetic characters, an encyclopedic grasp of 20th-century history and a spiritual sense that sees through the conventional barriers between this life and the one to come-or the one before." -- Ron Charles - Washington Post
"This book is the real thing." -- Julia Livshin - Chicago Tribune