June 2016 Book of the Month
In a Nutshell: Timeless fairytale • Eternal love • Lyrical quest
An enchanting, beautifully written novel about how first love can shape one’s life.
Joshua Pearl is from another world but has been trapped in ours, where his own fairytale realm is no longer believed in. After being taken in by an old man, Joshua’s journey is shrouded in a dream-like quality as he tries to piece his life together. While plotting his escape, Joshua experiences fragmented memories; the fleeting strangeness of shadows and light; premonitions that make him fear that everything might vanish. Joshua has a passion for photography, for documenting what he sees, capturing moments in time, and he also recalls that his first subject was a girl he spotted on a boat. Then the old man says it's time for Joshua to go, that he knows about his sadness, and the girl. And so he leaves in search of his lost love, embarking on a yearning quest that sees him having to piece together fragments of his memory, and make sense of objects he finds.
This is a timeless and tender tale of love and longing by a celebrated author, and high praise must also go to the translators - Sarah Ardizzone and Sam Gordon - for their luminous rendering of this novel from the French original. ~ Joanne Owen
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