Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor
know he's still alive. But it wasn't always like this: in the Polish
village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book...Sixty years
later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old Alma, who was named after
a character in that book, undertakes an adventure to find her namesake
and save her family. With virtuosic skill and soaring imaginative power,
Nicole Krauss gradually draws these stories together toward a climax of
extraordinary depth and beauty (Newsday).