The Keep

by Jennifer Egan

After twenty years apart, two cousins reunite in Eastern Europe to renovate a medieval castle. The cousins are irrevocably bound to one another through the shared experience of their youth, when a childhood prank with devastating consequences changed both their lives forever. In an environment of desolation, isolation and paranoia, the cousins are falling under the gothic spell of the castle and its violent history. The crimes of the past and present are about to collide, and with unthinkable results ...

• ISBN10: 0349120439
• ISBN13: 9780349120430
• Publish Date: 5 April 2007 (first published 1 August 2006)
• Publish Status: Withdrawn
• Out of Print: 29 March 2010
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
• Imprint: Abacus
• Format: Paperback (UK Trade)
• Pages: 256
• Language: English

Reviews

[empressbrooke]

This is more deserving of 3 1/2 stars, but I'll have to make do with 4. It could have been a 4-star book, but the last 30 pages are so jarringly out of place (it's like a short story with a new narrator tacked on) that it really ruined the great creepy atmosphere the author had created.

It really has some great things going for it - an interesting narration style, moments of what-is-real?, and a creepy old woman in a run-down, sprawling European castle. However, the last part of the book manages to remove the focus from that and turn it into something else altogether, and not for the best result.