In the Image: A Novel

by Dara Horn

Overview

A young woman's coming of age, a romantic love story, and a spiritual journey—each infused with the lessons of history.

In the Image is an extraordinary first novel illuminated by spiritual exploration, one that remembers "a language, a literature, a held hand, an entire world lived and breathed in the image of God."

Bill Landsmann, an elderly Jewish refugee in a New Jersey suburb with a passion for travel, is obsessed with building his slide collection of images from the Bible that he finds scattered throughout the world. The novel begins when he crosses paths with his granddaughter's friend, Leora, and continues by moving forward through her life and backward through his, revealing the unexpected links between his family's past and her family's future.

Not just a first novel but a cultural event—a wedding of secular and religious forms of literature—In the Image neither lives in the past nor seeks to escape it, but rather assimilates it, in the best sense of the word, honoring what is lost and finding, among the lost things, the treasures that can renew the present. Reading group guide included.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393325263
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/17/2003
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	495,452
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Dara Horn is the author of five novels and was one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. She has taught Jewish literature at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence College, and Yeshiva University. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

Editorial Reviews

"[T]old with moral passion, vigor, humor, and an unflagging fascination with the coincidences, miseries, grotesqueries, and triumphs of life."

American Heritage - Richard Snow

"Impressive...remarkable...All of the characters struggle for those gemlike qualities of passion, brilliance, clarity, fire."

The New Orleans Times-Picayune

"A gripping story told with learning and passion. It does not just use Jewish sources, it breathes them, and breathes into them the breath of life."

Rabbi David Wolpe

"Riveting—compulsive reading, authoritative from the first sentence. A fine book from a powerful new imagination."

PaknTreger Magazine

"Incredibly poignant ... with audacious appropriation of lines and themes from Jewish texts.... [Horn is] a writer with great self-confidence."

The Jerusalem Post

"A tender and touching story of vanished worlds and recovered lives."

Thane Rosenbaum

"It is a novel that seems flooded with godly light. —Jay Parini, author of The Apprentice Lover"

Jay Parini

"[I]t may be the most ambitious and accomplished first novel I have ever read."

Melvin Jules Bukiet

"Horn creates small worlds, beautifully detailed and textured, that ultimately fit together."

Jewish Woman Magazine

"An ebullient and vibrant new voice."

Jewish Week

"A stunning example of how to thread the warp of Jewish history into the woof of contemporary American Jewish life."

Hadassah Magazine

"[An] unsettling, otherworldly novel."

The Boston Globe

"Not merely a striking success as a whole but a technical tour de force."

Commentary - David Gelernter