"An elegiac novel…achieved through exquisitely chosen sensory details that reverberate with emotional intensity. Here [Krauss] gives us her tragic vision pure. It is a high-wire performance, only the wire has been replaced by an exposed nerve, and you hold your breath, and she does not fall."
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The New York Times Book Review

"Sweeps you up…beautiful and mysterious. Krauss's understanding of the varieties of human suffering―exceptional in a writer so young―makes the experience of her characters resonate in us. Their stunningly distinct and lively voices hold us captive to their versions of their lives. Krauss… can do just about anything she wants with the English language."
― Ann Harleman, The Boston Globe

"Nicole Krauss' third novel is such an ambitious, disturbing, brave, provocative work, one fears unfairly reducing it in a brief review…Every page vibrates with the tension of something unsolvable insisting on being solved…Krauss' sentences are so beautiful, rendered in such simple, clear language, I had to stop to reread many. Though they often describe inchoate anguish, their clarity and precision exhilarate."
– Joan Frank, The San Francisco Chronicle

"Masterful…Another extraordinary example of what fiction can do…a brilliantly orchestrated, mesmerizing whole that explores memory, solitude and an aching sense of loss and longing. Evocative and moving."
― NPR

"A complex, richly imagined new novel…In surges of mesmerizing sentences that are so complicated, clever, artful, and logically challenging that they read like aphorisms, Krauss aims to explicate, not the underlying implications of her characters' behavior, but the very cycles of history…It's a daunting undertaking, one that not every writer under 40 would choose or can do justice to, but Krauss's talent runs deep. And she cannot write a bad sentence: pound for pound, the sentences alone deliver epiphany upon epiphany."
― Janet Byrne, Huffington Post

"[Krauss] writes of her characters' despair with striking lucidity…an eloquent dramatization of the need to find that missing piece that will give life its meaning"
― The Wall Street Journal

"[A] brave new novel…[Krauss] has written one of the most lyrical novels I've read in a long time…Great House courageously wrestles with unimaginable, truly unspeakable loss, teaching us the difference between letting go and forgetting―and how to remember where we're from without losing sight of where we're going"
― Mike Fischer, The Journal Sentinel

"There is a beautiful sort of logic to the way its pattern unfolds—like a song, heard for the first time and yet strangely familiar, as if, making such intuitive sense, it must have always already existed...Her latest suggests her as [Philip] Roth's most likely literary heir. With Great House, anyhow, Krauss has made an undeniable bid for literary greatness."
― Yevgeniya Traps, New York Press

"Imagine a surprising, breathtaking panorama, captured in four adjacent Polaroids developing at different speeds that only reveal the full view at the last moment, and you have a feel for the patient mastery of Krauss's achievement."
– Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 'Best Book of 2010'

"Moments of psychological illumination that Krauss provides through her startling language…Great House is also an exhilarating read because of Krauss' unconventional style of storytelling. Although most of her characters are prisoners of the past, Krauss herself is a fiction pioneer, toying with fresh ways of rendering experience and emotion, giving us readers the thrill of seeing the novel stretched into amorphous new shapes."
― Maureen Corrigan, NPR

"The most heartbreaking part of Great House, the third novel by Nicole Krauss, is having to finish it…As the mysteries of this beautifully written novel come spooling out, you'll marvel at how profoundly one brilliantly crafted metaphor involving a mute wooden artifact can remind us what it means to be alive."
― Rachel Rosenblit, Elle

"Delayed revelation is one of the author's signatures, and in this, her third novel, she manages it with satisfying élan…Krauss' organic scenes soar, she is stunning."
― Karen R. Long, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"…her interrogation of Jewish loss and identity is both philosophical and riveting…the pervasive sense of loss, the yearning for second chances, particularly in love, make this book an emotionally vibrant meditation on trauma and healing…It's this unrelenting combination of intellectualism and emotion that kept me hooked"
― Anya Groner, Bookslut

"Full of cogent insights…an exercise in kaleidoscopic storytelling, a novel that seeks to weave four groups of characters into a larger meditation on memory and loss."
― David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times

"Steeped in place and memory, Great House is a worthy successor to Krauss' earlier works, more complex and more challenging…An impressively structured and intricate puzzle… Each section stands on its own while revealing itself as another piece in a painful, searching jigsaw."
– Robin Vidimos, The Denver Post

"An ethereal mystery…For reader who love beautiful language and complex characters, Great House will be hard to put down."
― Ellen Shapiro, People Magazine

"Surely if there is one book each author is meant to write, then there might also be one book each reader is meant to read. For plenty of fans out there, Great House just might be that book."
― Book Page

"A remarkable new novel…Krauss builds a consuming rush of a novel, far more organic and eloquent than her much-lauded The History of Love (2005)…[she] sweeps us in."
― Minna Proctor, Bookforum

"Krauss' masterful rendition of character is breathtaking, compelling…Great House examines the daily survival of Jews and demonstrates the destructiveness of lies and secrets within families. This tour de force of fiction writing will deeply satisfy fans of the author's first two books and bring her legions more."
― Ellen Loughran, Booklist

"Krauss deals with heavyweight themes―the Holocaust, the different ways people cope with suffering, the special cruelty of fathers, the costs of creativity―with meditative, insightful prose that makes for an intense and memorable reading experience."
― Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine University Law Library, in Library Journal

"In Great House, Krauss's satin prose turns a piece of furniture into a symbol of the freight given and taken from those we love."
― Cynthia Crossen, The Wall Street Journal

"This stunning work showcases Krauss's consistent talent…Krauss pulls together the disparate elements, settings, characters, and fragile connective tissue to form a formidable and haunting mosaic of loss and profound sorrow."
― Publishers Weekly