Crossings

I didn’t write this book. I stole it… A Parisian bookbinder stumbles across a manuscript containing three stories, each as unlikely as the other. The first, ‘The Education of a Monster’, is a letter penned by the poet Charles Baudelaire to an illiterate girl. The second, ‘City of Ghosts’, is a noir romance set in Paris in 1940 as the Germans are invading. The third, ‘Tales of the Albatross’, is the strangest of the three: the autobiography of a deathless enchantress. Together, they tell the tale of two lost souls peregrinating through time. An unforgettable tour de force, Crossings is a novel in three parts, designed to be read in two different directions, spanning a hundred and fifty years and seven lifetimes. ‘A magnificent, intricate machine of a book that is a sheer delight to read. With vivid characters and a brilliant premise, it is a puzzle, a love story and an adventure. Wildly imaginative and quite unlike anything I have ever read before.’ Chris Womersley ‘Audacious, ambitious and spellbinding, Crossings isn’t just a complex literary thriller, an intriguing puzzle, or a thoroughly enjoyable romantic alternative history of Paris and the Pacific islands, but all of these things at once.’ Jane Rawson ‘Crossings is playful, obsessive, romantic, intelligent, and wholly absorbing, with fascinations enough for a whole shelf of novels. It’s a book that feels not endless but endlessly replenishable.’ Kevin Brockmeier