The Man in the Box - Hardcover

Moran, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1573220604 ISBN 13: 9781573220606

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 1997

Synopsis

In 1943 Austria, young Niki Lukasser and his best friend Sigi, a blind girl, learn some of life's lessons when they take responsibility for the care and feeding of Dr. Weiss, a Jew whom Niki's parents are hiding from the Germans.

About this title

Review:

"During the war, we kept our Jew in a box." So begins The Man in the Box, Thomas Moran's debut novel. The Jew is Dr. Robert Weiss, an Austrian doctor on the run from the Nazis; the box is a small space built into the back of a hayloft owned by Herr Lukasser, an Austrian farmer. In the course of his two-year confinement, Dr. Weiss's only contact with the outside world is through Lukasser's son, Niki, whose life the doctor saved many years before, and Niki's blind girlfriend, Sigi. To these two teenagers he imparts the story of his life, fantastical tales conveyed in whispers through the wooden wall of his cell. Writing in spare, clean prose, Mr. Moran captures perfectly the tumultuous interior life of children on the verge of adulthood: the petty cruelties they visit on one another, their sexual stirrings and inchoate longings of adolescence. In the case of Niki, the added burden of the secret he must keep makes this passage particularly perilous--to himself, his family, and the Man in the Box.

About the Author:

Thomas Moran is the author of The Man in the Box, winner of the Book-of-the-Month Club® Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, The World I Made for Her, and Water, Carry Me. His novels have been translated into seven languages.

About this edition

• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1573220604
• ISBN 13: 9781573220606
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 260