In her third novel, GREAT HOUSE (W.W. Norton, $24.95), Nicole Krauss weaves together four narrative threads, all of which revolve around a large and impressive writing desk.  The novel opens with a young writer, Nadia, recounting how she came to own the desk. Gradually, more narrators pick up the story: an Israeli father struggling with his relationship to his son, a husband trying to understand the secrets of his late wife, a young American woman involved with a complicated man and his strange family, and an antiques dealer who specializes in recovering items pillaged by the Nazis.  With beautiful writing and heartbreaking details, Kraus unfolds each character’s losses, despair, and disappointment, leaving it to the reader to puzzle the whole picture together.