Nadia is a middlingly successful novelist in her 50s, difficult and introverted, who was given the desk in 1972 by Daniel Varsky, a Chilean friend of a friend. The desk has come to be vitally important, if sometimes obliquely, to four different characters, who each tell their stories in portmanteau style.

Filled with 19 awkwardly shaped drawers, one of which is never unlocked, it is 'an enormous, foreboding thing that bore down on the occupants of a room'. Great House centres on a massive writer's desk. And that, really, should be the end of the discussion. Great House, its serious, downbeat follow-up, is even better. Do we find it so often that we 'turn it off the box when it happens to sit there'? Are good books likewise so common that we can afford to dismiss them if their writers aren't at least polite enough to be older than we are? If the book is good, so what? Krauss's last novel, The History of Love, was very good indeed. I'm reminded of EM Forster's quote about happiness. There are, of course, smart and passionate sites out there by booklovers of all stripes, but there's also that strangely hostile army of folks who seem to wake up every morning with no other aim than to tell you, as loudly as possible, how much they hate everything you've ever loved, especially if it's written by someone who, to take a random example, is young, beautiful and married to a famous novelist. 'Twas ever thus, though the internet has upped the ease of sniping. There's an inevitable air of complaint about these facts, however sympathetically presented, the implication being that her ability to get books published has less to do with talent than with a particularly irritating streak of good luck. I t is difficult to find a profile of Nicole Krauss that doesn't mention 1) her beauty, 2) her youth or 3) her marriage to Jonathan Safran Foer (even younger, slightly less beautiful).

Great House by Nicole Krauss