“The Big House” is a fascinating story about a stolen table, which is full of mysteries and invisibly binds each new owner to itself. A lonely New York writer worked at a desk for twenty-five years straight: she inherited it from a young Chilean poet killed by Pinochet's secret police. And then a girl appears - in her own words, the daughter of a dead poet. Across the ocean, in London, a man learns a frightening secret that his wife has been hiding for fifty years. An antiques dealer is reconstructing, step by step, his father's office in Jerusalem, which was looted by the Nazis in 1944. A huge table with many drawers connects these seemingly parallel lives: it can give its owner power or, conversely, take it away. For its owners, the table is an embodied reminder of everything that has disappeared in the whirlpool of life: children, parents, entire nations and civilizations. Nicole Krauss managed to write an amazingly powerful novel about how memory tries to hold on to what is most precious in the face of inevitable loss. Nicole Krauss is a new star of American prose, the author of the acclaimed novel “Chronicles of Love,” dedicated to her husband, the famous writer Jonathan Safran Foer. The Big House is Krauss's third and final novel to date. In 2010, the book became a finalist for the National Book Award, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the United States.