To keep herself occupied after recently losing her sight, Zinaida begins a diary in the summer of 1888. When a family rents a guesthouse on her family's estate, Zinaida meets and befriends Anton, the middle son, who is a doctor and a writer. As the summer progresses, Zinaida's diary becomes an intimate, intropective narrative of her singular relationship with Anton. More than a century later, Katya Kendall discovers Zinaida's diary, and in a last...

The lives of fifty-four-year-old concierge Rene Michel and extremely bright, suicidal twelve-year-old Paloma Josse are transformed by the arrival of a new tenant, Kakuro Ozu. We are in an elegant hotel particulier in the center of Paris. Renee, the building's concierge, is short, ugly, and plump. She has bunions on her feet. She is cantankerous and addicted to television soaps. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In short, she is everything...

Through a series of condolence letters from an unknown correspondent, Camille Werner learns she may be the daughter of Annie and Louis, two teenage friends who lived in a small French town on the cusp of WWII. Set in Paris, 1975.

"They find the boy by the swimming pool, dolls floating on its surface. Inside the house, his teacher lies dead. But he claims to remember nothing. June 2010. In the middle of a World Cup match, Martin Servaz receives a call from a long-lost lover. A few miles away in the town of Marsac, Classics professor Claire Diemar has been brutally murdered. As if that weren't disturbing enough, Servaz receives a cryptic e-mail indicating that Julian Hirtmann,...

“One helluva read.”—Newsweek • “Gripping.”—Outside • “Spellbinding.”—Associated Press • “Powerful.”—New York 

In 1912, the Saint Anna, a Russian exploration vessel in search of fertile hunting grounds, was frozen into the polar ice cap, trapping her crew aboard. For nearly a year and a half, they struggled to stay alive....