classics

Helping those in need

Visit Site

MP3 Audio Sample

rating
 
 
goodreads logo

Short Synopsis
An intoxicating combination of mystery, spirituality, redemption, piety, and passion, The World To Come is Dara Horn's follow-up to her breakout critically acclaimed debut novel In the Image. Using a real-life art heist as her starting point, Horn traces the life and times of several characters, including Russian-born artist Marc Chagall and the New Jersey-based Ziskind family.

Full Synopsis
An intoxicating combination of mystery, spirituality, redemption, piety, and passion, The World To Come is Dara Horn's follow-up to her breakout, critically acclaimed debut novel In the Image. Using a real-life art heist as her starting point, Horn traces the life and times of several characters, including Russian-born artist Marc Chagall and the New Jersey–based Ziskind family.

Benjamin Ziskind, a former child prodigy, now spends his days writing questions for a television trivia show. After Ben's twin sister, Sara, forces him to attend a singles cocktail party at a Jewish museum, Ben spots Over Vitebsk, a Chagall sketch that once hung in the twins' childhood home. Convinced the painting was stolen from his family, Ben steals the work of art and enlists Sara to create a forgery to replace it. While trying to evade the police, Ben attempts to find the truth of how the painting got to the museum.

From a Jewish orphanage in 1920s Soviet Russia where Marc Chagall brought art to orphaned Jewish boys, to a junior high school in Newark, New Jersey, with a stop in the jungles of Da Nang, Vietnam, Horn weaves a story of mystery, romance, folklore, history and theology into a spellbinding modern tale. Richly satisfying and 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.

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

"An accomplished work that beautifully explains how families---in all their maddening, smothering, supportive glory---create us." ---The Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Nothing short of amazing." ---Entertainment Weekly

"Spellbinding.... A compelling collage of history, mystery, theology, and scripture, The World to Come is a narrative tour de force crackling with conundrums and dark truths." ---Booklist Starred Review
Booklist Review

Booklist Bestseller

Publishers Weekly Review

Entertainment Weekly Editor's Choice

The World to Come

Author Dara Horn

Narrated by William Dufris

Publication date Mar 8, 2006

Running time 14 hrs

Available Formats

Suggestions?
Let us know!