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  • The World to Come

  • Written by: Dara Horn
  • Narrated by: William Dufris
  • Length: 13 hrs and 28 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (2 ratings)

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The World to Come cover art

The World to Come

Written by: Dara Horn
Narrated by: William Dufris
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Publisher's Summary

An intoxicating combination of mystery, spirituality, redemption, piety, and passion, The World to Come is Dara Horn's follow-up to her breakout, critically-acclaimed debut novel In the Image. Using a real-life art heist as her starting point, Horn traces the life and times of several characters, including Russian-born artist Marc Chagall and the New Jersey-based Ziskind family.

Benjamin Ziskind, a former child prodigy, now spends his days writing questions for a television trivia show. After Ben's twin sister Sara forces him to attend a singles cocktail party at a Jewish museum, Ben spots Over Vitebsk, a Chagall sketch that once hung in the twins' childhood home. Convinced the painting was stolen from his family, Ben steals the work of art and enlists Sara to create a forgery to replace it. While trying to evade the police, Ben attempts to find the truth of how the painting got to the museum.

From a Jewish orphanage in 1920s Soviet Russia where Marc Chagall taught art to orphaned Jewish boys, to a junior high school in Newark, New Jersey, with a stop in the jungles of Da Nang, Vietnam, Horn weaves a story of mystery, romance, folklore, history, and theology into a spellbinding modern tale. 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.

©2006 Dara Horn (P)2006 Tantor Media, Inc.

What the critics say

"A deeply satisfying literary mystery and a funny-sad meditation on how the past haunts the present, and how we haunt the future." (Time)
"Spellbinding....A compelling collage of history, mystery, theology, and scripture, The World to Come is a narrative tour de force crackling with conundrums and dark truths." (Booklist)

What listeners say about The World to Come

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Beautiful

This is a rich, beautiful story that needs to be reread. It’s filled with enchanting folklore, family, art, and it asks the big questions in life.

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    2 out of 5 stars

slow book, beautiful ideas, but nothing happens

I was really looking forward to reading a book that is a Jewish story but doesn't revolve around the holocaust. But I still found this book to be quite depressing. it had a good premise, and I liked exploring members of the family in different generations, but there wasn't much of a story, no beginning, middle, and end. The book was mostly a wild fever dream with some beautiful but very confusing Jewish ideas and mini stories(i.e., the world to come, Dead Town) sprinkled throughout.

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