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."This neo-gothic tale conjures a wicked form of therapy for BlackBerry-addicted urbanites...Egan’s clever scenario presents Danny’s mental liberation as both thrilling and dangerous–imagination is the ultimate drug, she suggests–and the novel luxuriates in Wilkie Collins-style atmospherics." - The New YorkerTwo 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.“Egan’s third novel... is a strange, clever, and always compelling meditation on the relationship between the imagination and the captivities (psychological, metaphysical, and even physical) of modern life.” — Joseph O’Neill, The Atlantic When Gurner reads conversations, he announces the name of the person before reading the dialogue. This technique is as annoying as it is helpful, making the recording sound more like a grade school teacher reading aloud rather than a sophisticated audiobook production. Inmate Ray is working on a gothic novel at his prison's writing workshop. Eagan alternates chapters between him in prison and the adventures of his alter ego, Danny, within the novel. The speech patterns of Ray's fellow inmates are nicely individualized, but the women who inhabit the embedded novel are too similar. Geneva Carr appears only in the third part of the novel (on the last disc). As the voice of Ray's creative writing teacher and love interest, Carr explores the complexities of a woman who falls for a prisoner and makes listeners wish she'd had more to do in this production. The Keep is a clever, quirky novel that ping-pongs the listener between a medieval castle that kept people out and a modern prison that fences people in until the two worlds collide.