Book description
"Of course, I've always had a secret. Have I always known it? I
suppose I did, in a way - in the way that children know such things.
That is, I knew and didn't know." In this novel Eva Hoffman
explores various kinds and strata of secrets: intimate secrets, and
secrets of family past; the kinds of secrets that can be decoded from
clues, and the kind that themselves seem to offer tantalizing clues to
the fundamental mysteries of the human selfhood. This is a story about a
peculiarly powerful mother-daughter bond and about a haunting, about a
young woman's quest for individuation and the challenges posed by
contemporary science to our deepest notions of individuality. Using the
near future to reflect on the conditions of the present, Hoffman has
written a tale that grapples with the oldest riddles of identity,
consciousness and self-knowledge - a novel of ideas for our time, and an
imaginative fable whose resonances are timeless. Eva Hoffman was born
in Cracow, Poland, and emigrated to America at the age of thirteen. The
recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award and an award
from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, she
currently lives in London.
