The New York Times – Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: What gives the quickening of life to this elegiac novel…[is] exquisitely chosen sensory details that reverberate with emotional intensity…Krauss has taken great risks in dispensing with the whimsy and humor that she summoned for her tragic vision in The History of Love. Here she gives us her tragic vision pure. It is a high-wire performance, only the wire has been replaced by an exposed nerve, and you hold your breath, and she does not fall.