The Lair

“An intelligent, erudite, inexhaustible story-teller, in his essays as much as in his fiction, Norman Manea is above all a witness, someone who has lived to tell the tale. In [The Lair], as in all his work, we find the defining experiences of the twentieth century—the death camps, deportation, totalitarianism (both Fascism and Communism), marginalisation, deracination, exile, self-regeneration—filtered through the sensibility of one of its most astute survivors.”—Costa Bradatan, Times Literary Supplement

A New York Times Book Review “Editor’s Choice”


“[An] acclaimed novel of love, isolation and the disorientation of being submerged in another culture.”—Granta

“Compelling.”—Tess Lewis, Arts Fuse

“Great imaginative energy. . . . An elaborate, intricate, delicate narrative structure, balanced just so. . . . The Lair shows us life as a richly incomplete and unresolved experience.”—Reginald Gibbons, TriQuarterly

Longlisted by Three Percent for their 2013 Best Translated Book in Fiction

A New York Times Book Review “Editor’s Choice”

~New York Times

“Compelling.”—Tess Lewis, Arts Fuse

~Tess Lewis, Arts Fuse

“Great imaginative energy. . . . An elaborate, intricate, delicate narrative structure, balanced just so. . . . The Lair shows us life as a richly incomplete and unresolved experience.”—Reginald Gibbons, TriQuarterly

~Reginald Gibbons, TriQuarterly