'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 with echoes of Roberto Bolaño, David Mitchell and Umberto Eco, Crossings is a novel in three parts, designed to be read in two different directions, spanning a hundred and fifty years and seven lifetimes.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Metempsychosis, or the transmigration of the soul, usually happens after death, when the consciousness and memories of an individual are transported into the body of another. If you believe that sort of thing. It is also a handy, if well-trodden, literary device, used to influential effect in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.' (Introduction)
'I didn’t write this review. I stole it. Or so a review that echoes the framing conceit of Alex Landragin’s elegant and unusual début might begin. This richly allusive, speculative historical novel opens with a preface from the book’s self-described ‘adopted parent’, the fictionalised ‘Alex Landragin’. Following the sudden death of the ‘Baroness’, an ardent and obsessive bibliophile with a keen interest in Charles Baudelaire, this ‘second-generation Parisian bookbinder’ finds himself in possession of a mysterious loose-leaf manuscript. Despite the Baroness’s strict injunction not to read it, he finally succumbs to curiosity and devours it in ‘one fevered sitting, on a winter’s night so cold ice was forming on the Seine’.' (Introduction)
'I didn’t write this review. I stole it. Or so a review that echoes the framing conceit of Alex Landragin’s elegant and unusual début might begin. This richly allusive, speculative historical novel opens with a preface from the book’s self-described ‘adopted parent’, the fictionalised ‘Alex Landragin’. Following the sudden death of the ‘Baroness’, an ardent and obsessive bibliophile with a keen interest in Charles Baudelaire, this ‘second-generation Parisian bookbinder’ finds himself in possession of a mysterious loose-leaf manuscript. Despite the Baroness’s strict injunction not to read it, he finally succumbs to curiosity and devours it in ‘one fevered sitting, on a winter’s night so cold ice was forming on the Seine’.' (Introduction)
'Metempsychosis, or the transmigration of the soul, usually happens after death, when the consciousness and memories of an individual are transported into the body of another. If you believe that sort of thing. It is also a handy, if well-trodden, literary device, used to influential effect in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.' (Introduction)
