The Glass Room
On honeymoon in Venice in 1929 Viktor and Liesel Landauer face a
new world when they meet brilliant architect Rainer Von Abt. Soon,
on a hillside near a provincial Czech town, the Landauer house with
its celebrated Glass Room will become Von Abt’s greatest work,
a modernist masterpiece in glass and steel, with travertine floors
and onyx walls, filled with light and optimism. But while Viktor’s
beautiful wife is Aryan, he is Jewish and so when Nazi troops arrive
the family, accompanied by his lover and child, must flee.
Yet their exile is not the end of this spectacular building. It slips
from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet and finally to the
Czechoslovak state, the crystalline perfection of the Glass Room always
exerting a gravitational pull on those who know it. It becomes a laboratory,
a shelter from the storm of war, and a place where the broken and
the ruined find some kind of comfort until, with the collapse of Communism,
the Landauers can finally return to where their story began.
from the jacket blurb (Little, Brown 2009)
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