Mohr: A Novel

When a solitary man stumbles upon a cache of photographs, sometimes-and

only sometimes-he can sense the lives of the people in them. Sometimes he can

find in their faces and in the way they hold themselves or the way they perform

before the camera, the light trace of their story.

Following just that path, acclaimed novelist Frederick Reuss has created a love

story of historic proportions. Mohr: A Novel is about a man and wife whose life

together is marked irreparably by a deeply troubled and world-testing era.

With the sort of enthralling narrative step that always marks his work, Reuss allows

their story to rise from a cache of photographs he uncovered in Germany-photographs

from the 1920s and '30s of the exiled Jewish playwright and novelist

Max Mohr; K簿聶翻the, the beautiful wife he left behind; and Eva, their daughter, who

would live through it all but would never really understand what had happened.

The interplay between Reuss's revealing prose and the real faces in nearly 50

photographs offers a reading experience that may be unprecedented in novels.

From the first paragraph and that first creased image, which Eva may have taken,

of the Mohrs at their table in Germany just before Max walked away from their

lives, this beautiful and powerful novel works as deeply on the reader as a family

photo album.