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Afterwards, instead of returning to his life in Manhattan, he rents a tiny flat overlooking the sea in Tel Aviv. When his path crosses that of a maverick rabbi, he follows the teacher to a house of retreat. Over the course of the novel we discover that the death of both his parents has brought Epstein to a dark place: he has abdicated the responsibilities of his decades-long marriage, quit his job and is now looking for ways to rid himself of his considerable fortune. At the start we learn that he has disappeared, leaving only a briefcase. One strand, written in the third person, describes the course taken by Epstein, a clever, angry and extremely wealthy former lawyer. This sense of home as something perilous, unstable and insubstantial haunts everything Krauss writes.įorest Dark takes its title from Dante’s famous lines: ‘In the middle of the journey of life, I found myself within a dark wood.’ The story alternates between two characters, both from New York, travelling in Israel. They went to Israel and America (and, in her maternal grandparents’ case, England, for a time). She has said that each of her four grandparents was uprooted by the Second World War and all came from places that were either destroyed or, thanks to the redrawing of borders, no longer exist. History, belonging, reconciliation, the idea of home: these are the subjects to which Krauss returns. Here, too, the long shadow of the Holocaust and the diaspora darkened and complicated the lives of her characters. This was followed by Great House, which had at its centre a vast writing desk and its various owners, each of whom took it in turn to narrate their stories. It is among the finest books of the last fifty years, a wonderful and sometimes harrowing examination of the unlooked-for opportunities brought about by loss: the loss of someone beloved as well as the multiple losses of the Holocaust. Her second novel, The History of Love, was a bestseller, translated into thirty-five languages.

Krauss is indeed a highly serious writer and also a very brilliant one. I wanted to live there, I wanted to make a life there.

‘You open a book by Knut Hamsun or W G Sebald or Thomas Bernhard and everything that doesn’t matter is gone in an instant and you’re in a world where everything matters, in the most critical way. ‘I’m interested in serious things because that’s what I’ve always gone to literature for,’ Nicole Krauss has said.