The Keep (Signed First Edition)

Jennifer Egan

ISBN 10: 1400043921 / ISBN 13: 9781400043927

Published by Knopf, New York, 2006

About this Item

Knopf, New York, 2006. First edition. First printing. Very Fine in a very fine dust jacket. A tight, clean copy, fresh and unread. Comes with archival-quality mylar dust jacket protector. Price intact of front jacket flap. Shipped in well padded box. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page--the author's name only, with no other marks or writing. Purchased new and opened only for author signature. Octavo, 240 pages. A gothic-tinged novel in which two estranged cousins reunite to renovate a crumbling European castle, only to have their shared past surface in unexpected ways. Egan's fourth novel, following the National Book Award nominated "Look at Me" and preceding her Pulitzer Prize winning "A Visit from the Goon Squad.".

Seller Inventory # pp0806-14

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Keep (Signed First Edition)
• Publisher: Knopf, New York
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1400043921
• ISBN 13: 9781400043927
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Signed First Editions
  • Signed Literary Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

From National Book Award finalist Jennifer Egan, author of Look at Me (“Brilliantly unnerving . . . A haunting, sharp, splendidly articulate novel” —The New York Times), a spellbinding work of literary suspense enacted in a chilling psychological landscape—a dazzling tour de force.

Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank whose devastating consequences changed both their lives, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe, a castle steeped in blood lore and family pride. Built over a secret system of caves and tunnels, the castle and its violent history invoke and subvert all the elements of a gothic past: twins, a pool, an old baroness, a fearsome tower. 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—a story about two cousins who unite to renovate a castle—that brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.

Egan’s relentlessly gripping page-turner plays with rich forms—ghost story, love story, gothic—and transfixing themes: the undertow of history, the fate of imagination in the cacophony of modern life, the uncanny likeness between communications technology and the supernatural. In a narrative that shifts seamlessly from an ancient European castle to a maximum security prison, Egan conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep—the last stand, the final holdout, the place you run to when the walls are breached—is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive.

A novel of fierce intelligence and velocity; a bravura performance from a writer of consummate skill and style.

About the Author

Jennifer Egan is the author of Look at Me, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.