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In 1949, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie has returned as a Trustee to live in the long-defunct boarding school that he had attended as a child. There he is preparing a memoir. He writes, with faltering recall, of the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and of his fascination with the Egyptian archaeological adventures of his distant cousin, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie. Memories return too of the passions of a boyhood friendship with named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island. From one of our greatest writers, this is a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past - one that displays her delight in Jamesian irony and the mythical flavor of a Kafka parable, woven into her own distinct voice.

Cynthia Ozick's essays, novels and short stories have won numerous prizes and awards; THE PUTTERMESSER PAPERS was a finalist for the National Book Award and QUARREL & QUANDARY was a finalist for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel was shortlisted for the National Book Award in America. She lives in the New York City area.

One of the greatest fiction writers and critics alive today * The New York Times * Unequaled in her generation * Harold Bloom * A genuinely brilliant modern writer * Guardian * One of America's most important and inventive writers * Time Out * She is a writer innately drawn to paradox, and to the moral questions inherent in the relationships between richness and poverty, mind and body, history and imagination * Ali Smith * The most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our times * John Sutherland, New York Times Book Review * Beguiling. Ozick is adept at capturing the vicissitudes of fading memory or flashes of lucid insight. A fascinating portrait of isolation, memory, and loss * Publishers Weekly * A literary national treasure returns with a textured, gripping tale that peels back layers of antisemitism, with echoes of both A Separate Peace and the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer * O, the Oprah Magazine *