A young woman's coming of age, a romantic love story, and a spiritual journey — each infused with the lessons of history.

In the Image is an extraordinary first novel illuminated by spiritual exploration, one that remembers "a language, a literature, a held hand, an entire world lived and breathed in the image of God."

Bill Landsmann, an elderly Jewish refugee in a New Jersey suburb with a passion for travel, is obsessed with building his slide collection of images from the Bible that he finds scattered throughout the world. The novel begins when he crosses paths with his granddaughter's friend, Leora, and continues by moving forward through her life and backward through his, revealing the unexpected links between his family's past and her family's future.

Not just a first novel but a cultural event — a wedding of secular and religious forms of literature — In the Image neither lives in the past nor seeks to escape it, but rather assimilates it, in the best sense of the word, honoring what is lost and finding, among the lost things, the treasures that can renew the present.

"[An] unsettling, otherworldly novel." Boston Globe

"Not merely a striking success as a whole but a technical tour de force." David Gelernter, Commentary

"Incredibly poignant...with audacious appropriation of lines and themes from Jewish texts....a writer with great self-confidence." Jerusalem Post

"Horn creates small worlds, beautifully detailed and textured, that ultimately fit together." Jewish Woman Magazine

"Impressive...remarkable...All of the characters struggle for those gemlike qualities of passion, brilliance, clarity, fire." New Orleans Times-Picayune

"Riveting — compulsive reading, authoritative from the first sentence. A fine book from a powerful new imagination." PaknTreger Magazine

"It is a novel that seems flooded with godly light." Jay Parini, author of The Apprentice Lover

"[I]t may be the most ambitious and accomplished first novel I have ever read." Melvin Jules Bukiet, author of Strange Fire

"I left the novel spellbound by the breadth of Horn's imagination and the generosity of her vision." Andrew Furman, author of Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma

"A tender and touching story of vanished worlds and recovered lives." Thane Rosenbaum, author of The Golems of Gotham

"An enchanting, introspective and emotionally charged debut." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Bill Landsmann, an elderly Jewish refugee in a New Jersey suburb with a passion for travel, is obsessed with building his slide collection of images from the Bible that he finds scattered throughout the world. The novel begins when he crosses paths with his granddaughter's friend, Leora, and continues by moving forward through her life and backward through his, revealing the unexpected links between his family's past and her family's future.

Dara Horn is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Harvard University. Her award-winning nonfiction writing has appeared in Hadassah, American Heritage, Science, and the Christian Science Monitor. She lives in New York City.