The World to Come

A Novel

Dara Horn (Author)

"Nothing short of amazing."—Entertainment Weekly

A million-dollar painting by Marc Chagall is stolen from a museum. The unlikely thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a thirty-year-old quiz-show writer. As Benjamin and his twin sister try to evade the police, they find themselves recalling their dead parents—the father who lost a leg in Vietnam, the mother who created children's books—and their stories about trust, loss, and betrayal.

What is true, what is fake, what does it mean? Eighty years before the theft, these questions haunted Chagall and the enigmatic Yiddish fabulist Der Nister ("The Hidden One"), teachers at a school for Jewish orphans. Both the painting and the questions will travel through time to shape the Ziskinds' futures.

With astonishing grace and simplicity, Dara Horn interweaves a real art heist, history, biography, theology, and Yiddish literature. Richly satisfying, utterly unique, her novel opens the door to "the world to come"—not life after death, but the world we create through our actions right now. Reading group guide included.

Book Details

Paperback
October 2006
ISBN 978-0-393-32906-3
5.5 × 8.3 in / 336 pages
Territory Rights: Worldwide including Canada, Singapore and Malaysia, but excluding the British Commonwealth.

Awards

National Jewish Book Award

Endorsements & Reviews

“A deeply satisfying literary mystery and a funny-sad meditation on how the past haunts the present—and how we haunt the future.” — Time

“Symphonic and piercingly beautiful . . . the novel suspends us between emotions, never allowing any to become predominant, and we hang there in that indeterminate space, perfectly happy, hoping that the book will never end.” — Bethany Scneider, Newsday

“Brilliantly imagined.” — Merle Rubin, Wall Street Journal

“Deeply sympathetic characters, an encyclopedic grasp of 20th-century history and a spiritual sense that sees through the conventional barriers between this life and the one to come—or the one before.” — Ron Charles, Washington Post

“Horn’s deft touch is often wryly funny—but never maliciously so. . . . An accomplished work that beautifully explains how families—in all their maddening, smothering, supportive glory—create us.” — Natalie Danford, Los Angeles Times Book Review