Five Novels by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She is the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel which became a feature film starting Cameron Diaz in 2001, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, The Keep, which was a national bestseller, and winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for A Visit from the Goon.

The Invisible Circus
The high ideals and inevitable compromises of the 1960s form the background to this acclaimed novel. Phoebe O'Connor, eighteen years old in the summer of 1978, is too young to know the 1960s, but old enough to feel the anxiety of their influence. She is obsessed by the memory of her charismatic older sister, Faith, a flower child who died in Italy in 1970. Searching for the truth about Faith's death and life, Phoebe retraces her steps across Europe to the very place where she died. Her search yields more complex and disturbing revelations than she had wished for—about her sister and the generation she emblematized.

Look at Me
At the start of this edgy and ambitiously multilayered novel, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied.

The Keep
Award-winning author Jennifer Egan brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep –the tower, the last stand –is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive.

Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.