The Keep [Paperback]

Award-winning author Jennifer Egan brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep –the tower, the last stand –is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive.

Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. 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 that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.“Dazzling. . . . Prodigiously entertaining and profoundly moving.”—Madison Smartt Bell,The New York Times Book Review“Daring. . . . Irresistibly suspenseful.” —The Los Angeles Times“The events that transpire are so surprising and provocative, the humor so wry, the sheer pleasure of readingThe Keepso great, one instantly feels impelled to read it again. . . . Satirically sublime.”—Chicago Tribune“Roiling and captivating. . . . As you finish this novel, part horror tale, part mystery, part romance, the mind lingers over it, amazed by how vivid Egan has made it, how witty, how disturbing, how credible, and yet how utterly fantastic.”—O, The Oprah Magazine“This neo-gothic tale conjures a wicked form of therapy for BlackBerry-addicted urbanites. . . . Egan’s clever scenario presents Danny’s mental liberation as both thrilling and dangerous—imagination is the ultimate drug, she suggests—and the novel luxuriates in Wilkie Collins–style atmospherics.”—The New Yorker“Egan is an exceptionally intelligent writer whose joy at appropriating and subverting genres and cllĂ&