In the StoryThe Collection
Paris, 1882. Before anyone can understand the impossible, its witnesses must be kept from disappearing. Letters, séances, unsettling accounts pass through the hands of people trying to distinguish trickery from what resists explanation. But preservation means more than stacking documents. A family wants an artifact withdrawn. A name puts someone at risk. Evidence already has a price.
Open the novel ↗A moment in the opening pages
She remembered four winters in Saint-Cloud during the previous war. A house belonging to the Delatours. A girl her own age, Lucile, with whom she said she had shared a bedroom, punishments, the lice of 1917, and fear of distant guns. In her present life, Élisabeth Bauer had returned to Germany with her mother in the summer of 1914 and had not come back to France until 1937.Read the excerpt ↗