The World to Come by Dara Horn

About the program:

Book Club is a reading group chaired by a volunteer DVAA Member each month. This month will be chaired by Eleanor Levie. This is a Members-only program (including Supporting Members). To participate in this program, read the book, and join the discussion with a potluck at DVAA.

About the reading:

This month’s reading: The World to Come by Dara Horn

A million-dollar painting by Marc Chagall is stolen from a museum during a singles’ cocktail hour.  The unlikely thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a lonely former child prodigy who writes questions for quiz shows and who is sure the painting used to hang on a wall of his parents’ living room.  As Ben tries to evade the police, he and his twin sister, Sara, seek out the truth of how the painting got to the museum, whether the “original” is actually a forgery, and whether Sara, an artist, can create a convincing forgery to take its place.

Prize-winning author Dara Horn interweaves mystery, romance, folklore, theology, history, and scripture into a spellbinding modern tale.  She brings us on a breathtaking collision course of past, present, and future — revealing both the ordinariness and the beauty of “the world to come.”  Nestling stories within stories, this is a novel of remarkable clarity and deep inner meaning.