The World to Come

by Dara Horn (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2006

  $3.50

  A million-dollar Chagall painting is stolen during a singles event at a New York museum. The painting has an unusual history, and now there is an unlikely thief Benjamin Ziskind, a lonely former child prodigy who now writes questions for TV shows and who believes the painting once belonged to his family. Benjamin's moment of apparent madness in stealing the painting is just one such moment in a web of riveting stories. For him, for his family and for Chagall, life is a breathtaking collision course of past, present and future, and the world to come starts right now.

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $3.50

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $3.50

  By the winner of three national awards, a daring, ambitious, and wildly readable novel. 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.