First published 2025
Lina and her father reach The Sea with little more than what they can carry. This strange enclave serves as a waystation for migrants, but it operates outside normal time. Here, centuries fold into each other like rooms in an impossible building. Lina discovers she can speak with people from distant eras. She meets Bento, a Jewish scholar working in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. She encounters Blucher, a philosopher escaping Nazi Germany in the 1930s. She befriends Jupiter, a poet from Tang Dynasty China. These brilliant minds become her teachers as her father grows sicker and begins revealing dark truths about their family history. His confessions force Lina to understand what drove them to this place between worlds. Through conversations with thinkers separated by hundreds of years, she must decide whether redemption remains possible after terrible choices.
Genres: literary-fiction, 21st-century, alternate-history, academic
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: The Sea, Amsterdam, Nazi Germany, Tang Dynasty China
Period: 17th Century, 1930s, Tang Dynasty
368 pages · Hardcover · W. W. Norton & Company
Content warnings: death