The House of Widows
Graywolf Press, 2008
From old America, new Europe, and the timeless Middle East, James learns what it means to live in the webbed world of the twenty-first century. In The House of Widows, Askold Melnyczuk offers a searing exploration of the individual’s role in the inexorable assault of history.
"The House of Widows is a dazzling novel, rich with fascinating characters, whose search for love and truth carries them from country to country, uncovering terrible secrets, and in the course of their journey revealing much about the history of the last half-century.”—Howard Zinn
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Available for Purchase at the following outlets:
Harvard Bookstore
Porter Square Books
IndieBound
Barnes & Noble
Amazon
Also available in eBook format for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble NookBook, Apple iBook, and Kobo eBook versions.
More Praise for THE HOUSE OF WIDOWS, A Booklist Editor’s Choice Selection
“Brisk, lyrical writing and a winning narrator make The House of Widows irresistible. A son’s quest to understand his father’s suicide, and so to excavate a family history extinguished by the exigencies of the new world, make it exceptional.”—Jhumpa Lahiri
“Askold Melnyczuk’s The House of Widows is a bewitching maze of storytelling that takes its postwar American hero on journeys to and through Europe to discover the secrets of earlier generations of his family. In so doing he comese across the would-be secret places of recent and contemporary European history — the betrayals, the uprootings, the iniquities, the cover-ups that seem to be demanded if individuals or organizations are to survive. But there is also, at moments, the ‘light of a flickering candle’ by which we can read and be heartened by the images that play on the wall of our cave. A mind-expanding book.”
—Nicholas Mosley
“The House of Widows is Askold Melnyczuk’s masterwork. It is a compelling story of fathers and sons and family ties in general, brimming with adventure, international intrigue, mystery, true historical events, and memorable characters from all walks of life. A novel of great scope and great wisdom, The House of Widows shows how, even in the presence of the worst atrocities imaginable, human beings are still capable of hope and love. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy, Dickens, and Hemingway, The House of Widows represents serious contemporary fiction at its best. I hope it reaches tens of thousands of readers, in America and far beyond.”
—Howard Frank Mosher
“Melnyczuk’s hallucinatory tale achieves something of the fierce, distracting power of D.H. Lawrence’s nerve-grating masterpiece, Women in Love.” —Kirkus
“…a small gem of a novel that’s filled with more crucial questions about the meaning of history than a hundred textbooks.”
—The Boston Globe
“…a tale that has all the richness of Doctor Zhivago meeting The Odessa Files.” —The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“…nearly perfect prose…almost endlessly quotable.” —Tricycle
