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 A family wants an artifact withdrawn.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
Élisabeth Bauer was thirty-five, with a residence permit renewed every three months and the German accent of a woman who had learned French twice: as a child, then as an adult. She worked for a dressmaker on Boulevard Voltaire. In July, a clinic doctor had referred her to Vernet because she complained of memories she could place nowhere in her known life.Read the excerpt ↗