Elie Wiesel, the bestselling author of Night, Holocaust survivor,
and Nobel Peace Prize- winner, offers a profound fictional account of
what one Holocaust survivor must endure to find out what happened to his
friend and savior after the war--while also discovering the meaning of
his own survival.
Raphael Lipkin is a man obsessed. He hears voices. He talks to ghosts.
He is spending the summer at the Mountain Clinic, a psychiatric hospital
in upstate New York--not as a patient, but as a visiting professional
with a secret, personal quest.
A professor of literature and a Holocaust survivor, Raphael, having
rebuilt his life since the war, sees it on the verge of coming apart
once more. He longs to talk to Pedro, the man who rescued him as a
fifteen-year-old orphan from postwar Poland and brought him to Paris,
becoming his friend, mentor, hero, and savior. But Pedro disappeared
inside the prisons of Stalin's Russia shortly after the war. Where is
Pedro now, and how can Raphael discern what is true and what is false
without him?
A mysterious nighttime caller directs Raphael's search to the Mountain
Clinic, a unique asylum for patients whose delusions spring up from the
Bible. Amid patients calling themselves Adam, Cain, Abraham, Joseph,
Jeremiah, and God, Raphael searches for Pedro's truth and the meaning of
his own survival in an extraordinary novel that penetrates the mysteries
of good, evil, and madness.
