Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2002
288 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
An extraordinary first novel illuminated by spiritual exploration, one that remembers "a language, a literature, a held hand, an entire world lived and breathed in the image of God."
Like A. S. Byatt's Possession, Dara Horn's novel seamlessly weaves its deeper preoccupations into a narrative thoroughly absorbing and satisfying. We follow Leora through the death of a friend in high school and on to college, career, and falling in love, while simultaneously tracing the story of Bill Landsmann, her lost friend's grandfather, back to Amsterdam, Austria, and New York's Lower East Side. Each story is simply told and yet is also a foray into the nature of good and evil, of the significance of tradition and the law, of the presence or absence of God.
Not just a first novel but a cultural event—a wedding of secular and religious forms of literature—In the Image neither lives in the past nor seeks to escape it, but rather assimilates it, in the best sense of the word, honoring what is lost and finding, among the lost things, the treasures that can renew the present.
"An occasional stiffness in the narration is overcome by the warmth of her appreciation of Jewish culture and heritage, and she makes eloquent use of recurring motifs ... as she captures life in early 20th-century Europe and contemporary New York." - Publishers Weekly.
"Even those characters embodying the worst of human nature are compelling. Strongly recommended for larger fiction collections." - Library Journal.
"Starred Review. Poignant and profound, a novel that invites careful re-reading." - Booklist.
"Earnest but immature: a story that's thoroughly well-intended but that generates too little drive or drama to rise to the next level." - Kirkus Reviews.
"Mezmerizingly blends religious and family history with its protagonist's coming-of-age story ... a stunning and absorbing first novel." - San Francisco Chronicle.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michael B. Priest
Dara Horn is the award-winning author of six books, including the novels In the Image (Norton 2002), The World to Come (Norton 2006), All Other Nights (Norton 2009), A Guide for the Perplexed (Norton 2013), and Eternal Life (Norton 2018), and the essay collection People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (Norton 2021). One of Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists (2007), she is the recipient of two National Jewish Book Awards, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Harold U. Ribalow Award, and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, and she was a finalist for the Wingate Prize, the Simpson Family Literary Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Her books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books, Booklist's 25 Best Books of the Decade, and San ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Dara Horn's Website
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