"A short but searing new novel by Lily Tuck. . . . [ T]he National Book Award winner brings to vivid life just one of the thousands killed in the Nazi death camp. . . . As Tuck shows us in this short, brutal book, Czeslawa Kwoka was a human being rather than a statistic, robbed of a life that can only be imagined." -- Clea Simon - Boston Globe "Clocking in at just 144 pages, this slim novel will devastate you all in one sitting . . . Haunting and austere, The Rest Is Memory captures a childs struggle to understand the unimaginable. Its nothing short of a literary resurrection, tenderly and unflinchingly observed." -- Esquire, "The Best Books of Fall 2024" "An extraordinary achievement. . . . Like much of her output, including her mesmerizing The Double Life of Liliane, her book is a hybrid work that deftly mixes fact and fiction and blurs genres and boundaries. . . . Tuck has sensitively and skillfully created a memorial to a life cut short while shining necessary light on the darkest chapter of the 20th century." -- Malcolm Forbes - Minneapolis Star-Tribune "The haunting story of one real-life Polish teenager amplifies the infinite horror of Auschwitz....With myriad references to the historical realities of the Holocaust, the work beautifully interweaves Tucks imagined story of Czeslawas constrained life before the German occupation and the hideous conditions she faced during her short, brutal months at Auschwitz. Extensively annotated and researched, Tucks brief novel returns, time and time again, to the subject of memories, a theme alluded to in an epigraph consisting of a fragment of a Louise Glück poem. The author's skillful blending of facts and fiction reanimates the memory of one of the countless lost children of the Holocaust. A painful, essential, unflinching memento." -- Kirkus Reviews "Tuck (Sisters) draws on the true story of a Polish Catholic girl who died in Auschwitz in her unflinching latest...With graphic imagery and lyrical prose, Tuck vividly evokes Czeslawas innocence and resilience, as she tries to hold out hope by imagining Anton in Auschwitz with her. Its an unforgettable portrait of buoyant youth in the grimmest of places." -- Publishers Weekly "Tucks profound historical novel imagines Czeslawas life leading up to this photograph and during her time at Auschwitz... Tuck intersperses Czeslawas haunting narrative with varied historical accounts and figures, holding a resolute eye to the atrocities of the time and the lives cut short." -- Booklist "Though brief and austere, this novel is epic in its power to restore: first a girl, then her family, and at last an epoch in human history. Addictively compulsive, Lily Tucks story powers forward like the growing tragedy it chronicles, yet it never sacrifices the human moments, serenely and tenderly observed. Like a white stork rising from a dark forest, The Rest Is Memory fills the silence with a great beating of wings." -- Adam Johnson, author of the National Book Awardwinning Fortune Smiles "A wonderful novel, as formally innovative, controlled, and moving as any I have read in a long while. Lily Tuck is a stunning prose writer, a true original." -- Phillip Lopate, author of A Year and a Day "Lily Tuck writes with sensitivity of a young girls struggle to understand . . . the inevitable anguish that awaits her." -- Susanna Moore, author of The Lost Wife "A name, a photograph, a tattooed number. Not much more is known about Czeslawa Kwoka, a Polish Catholic girl who died in Auschwitz on March 12, 1943. But out of those few dry facts Lily Tuck has made an extraordinary and disturbingly brilliant novel, one that can stand with the best of W.G. Sebald or Patrick Modiano, and The Zone of Interest too, as a testament to what we must always remember." -- Michael Gorra, author of The Saddest Words: William Faulkners Civil War
