The Keep

by Jennifer Egan

Award-winning author Jennifer Egan brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep –the tower, the last stand –is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive.

Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.

(From Publisher)

Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and St. John's College, Cambridge.

She is the author of three novels, The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Keep, as well as a collection of stories, Emerald City. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope and Ploughshares, among others, and her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.

She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was recently a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and sons.