The History of Love

By Nicole Krauss,

Book cover of The History of Love

Book description

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…


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Why read it?

2 authors picked The History of Love as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

The shadow of the Holocaust leans over this story, which moves between noughties New York and Poland sixty years earlier. Octogenarian Leo Gursky, now living in Manhattan, once wrote a book, The History of Love, inspired by his love for a girl in his village in Poland. Alma Singer is a 14-year-old girl living on the other side of the city, and the mystery of what happened to his novel brings them together. 

Every time I open The History of Love—and I return to it again and again—I find myself suspended between tears and laughter reading this gorgeous, emotionally-charged story. It is full of heartbreak and humor about an old man, Leo Gursky and a teenage girl, Alma—and the history, longing, and loneliness that brings them together, and connects all of us. 

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