The Keep

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.

"This neo-gothic tale conjures a wicked form of therapy for BlackBerry-addicted urbanites…Egan’s clever scenario presents Danny’s mental liberation as both thrilling and dangerous–imagination is the ultimate drug, she suggests–and the novel luxuriates in Wilkie Collins-style atmospherics." -  The New Yorker

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.

“Egan’s third novel… is a strange, clever, and always compelling meditation on the relationship between the imagination and the captivities (psychological, metaphysical, and even physical) of modern life.” — Joseph O’Neill, The Atlantic