SOURCE: Kirshenbaum, Binnie. “A Desire to Belong.” New Leader 134, no. 1 (January-February 2001): 30-1.

In the following review, Kirshenbaum praises What Remains as emotionally compelling and gracefully written.

Nicholas Delbanco's 13th novel is a breathtakingly beautiful slim volume. But don't be misled by its size. The scope of What Remains is epic, spanning generations and continents. It is further testimony to Delbanco's skill as a writer that he artfully packs so much into such a compact work. There is nothing splashy here, no verbal pyrotechnics. Rather, it is the grace of language and of ideas that creates the gravitational pull which draws in the reader and swells the heart.

Told in chapters of alternating voices that skip back and forth in the time between 1944 and 1996, What Remains is the story of an extended family, three generations of refugees. These are not Emma Lazarus' tired, poor, huddled masses. They are rich...