This book was a gift. I only read the first few pages and didn’t think it was for me. Designed to be read either as a first-to-last-page narrative or by following an alternative chapter sequence that offers a very different reading experience. Soon after a Parisian bookbinder is tasked with binding a manuscript called Crossings for a reputed bibliophile, he learns his client has been murdered. He believes the crime is connected to the manuscript, so, disregarding his client's wishes, he reads it. What he discovers is a dazzling story consisting of three narratives, each as unlikely as the next. The first is a ghost story penned by notorious nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire for an illiterate girl. The second is a noir romance set in Paris on the eve of Nazi occupation, purporting to be the work of exiled German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. The third is the fantastical memoir of a woman claiming to inhabit many bodies across multiple lifetimes as she searches for her lost love. As the connections between this cast of unforgettable characters deepen, their stories merge into an extraordinary tale of separated lovers held captive by an ancient law, finding and losing love again and again.

ISBN: 9781250796721