Reader Score
53%
53% of readers
recommend this book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - "Part horror tale, part mystery, part romance ... utterly fantastic."--O, The Oprah Magazine - The bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad 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.Jennifer Egan is the author of four novels: A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus; and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her husband and sons in Brooklyn.
"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 reading The Keep so 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 clichés--from prison memoir to Gothic ghost story--is evident on every dizzyingly inventive page." --The Washington Post "[A] remarkable piece of work. . . . Egan effectively echoes the works of Gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho) and Horace Walpole (Castle of Otranto), fusing a seemingly moribund genre with elements borrowed from the metafictions of John Barth, Italo Calvino and others. It's tricky; but it's a trick only a terrifically talented writer could pull off." --San Francisco Chronicle "If Kafka's Joseph K. and Lewis Carroll's Alice had a son, he would have to be Jennifer Egan's Danny. . . . No matter how many symbols and zany subplots she juggles . . . the novelist keeps the action moving and the irony biting." --Boston Sunday Globe "Intelligent, intense and remarkably intuitive. . . . Jennifer Egan gives us the satisfying thunk of a fully understood if unexpected, kind of sense." --Nan Goldberg, The New York Observer "It's precisely Egan's talent for tapping into the American subconscious--with deeply intuitive forays into the darker aspects of our technology-driven, image-saturated culture--that has established the author and journalist as a prescient literary voice." --Vogue "Jennifer Egan spins a haunting tale. . . . Egan's brilliance is in balancing the deliciously creepy elements of gothic-castle novels with the dead-on realism of a prisoner's life, to create a book worth keeping." --Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair