Jennifer Egan’s novel, The Keep
A Chicago Tribune, Kansas City Star, and Rocky Mountain News 2006 Best Book of the Year
Pulitzer Prize winning-author Jennifer Egan brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep—the tower, the last stand—is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive.
Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.
“Dazzling… Prodigiously entertaining and profoundly moving.” —Madison Smartt Bell, The New York Times Book Review
“Egan’s third novel… is a strange, clever, and always compelling meditation on the relationship between the imagination and the captivities (psychological, metaphysical, and even physical) of modern life.” — The Atlantic Monthly
“Remarkable… Egan effectively echoes the works of Gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho) and Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto), fusing a seemingly moribund genre with elements borrowed from the metafictions of John Barth, Italo Calvino and others. It’s tricky; but it’s a trick only a terrifically talented writer could pull off.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
Meeting times and locations:
Monday, September 19, 7 p.m., C.E. Room
Monday, September 26, 7 p.m., Warner Building
Where can I purchase this book?
Copies of The Keep are now available at Accent on Books, on Merrimon Avenue, at discounted price, thanks to parishioner, Lewis Sorrells.
The All Souls Book Group is the nucleus of the Kay Falk Literary Project, which is centered at the Cathedral as part of its teaching mission. For more information, please contact Emilie White at etwhite8@charter.net.