From the author of The Book of Lost Fragrances comes a haunting novel about a grieving woman who discovers the lost letters of novelist Victor Hugo, awakening a mystery that spans centuries.
In 1843, novelist Victor Hugo’s beloved nineteen-year-old daughter drowned. Ten years later, Hugo began participating in hundreds of séances to reestablish contact with her. In the process, he claimed to have communed with the likes of Plato, Galileo, Shakespeare, Dante, Jesus—and even the Devil himself. Hugo’s transcriptions of these conversations have all been published. Or so it was believed.
Recovering from her own losses, mythologist Jac L’Etoile arrives on the Isle of Jersey—where Hugo conducted the séances—hoping to uncover a secret about the island’s Celtic roots. But the man who’s invited her there, a troubled soul named Theo Gaspard, has hopes she’ll help him discover something quite different—Hugo’s lost conversations with someone called the Shadow of the Sepulcher.
What follows is an intricately plotted and atmospheric tale of suspense with a spellbinding ghost story at its heart, by one of America’s most gifted and imaginative novelists.
I read this as a stand-alone novel, not realizing that it was part of a series, but this book is actually the fifth book in MJ Rose’s ‘Reincarnationist’ series. Rose’s writing is lyrical, rich, intricately thought through and extremely detailed. I kept coming back to this novel whenever I was forced to stop. Seduction was a mix of the supernatural and historical fiction, and Rose did it magnificently. When I began reading, I felt that the title, as well as the cover, were fairly inaccurate to the novel, but by the end of it, both made sense to me.
One of my favorite things throughout the novel was how attuned to her sense of smell Jac L’Etoile was, and how her awesome olfactory senses eventually tied into the ending. I also really enjoyed their talks about reincarnation, as that is something rarely touched on in books that I have read, and always something that I’ve been intrigued by. I think I’d very much enjoy going back and reading the other books in this series.
I also really loved how we got to learn about Victor Hugo's life in Jersey, how his grief supposedly led him to almost deal with the devil. From what I know of Hugo's life, the things he was saying, how he was helping to rescue the children, all rang true to me as things that he might have said, and I sincerely appreciated that.
Reading through this novel, I wasn’t sure at first how each character was eventually going to tie back in, but it all began making sense afterwards, and I was entirely intrigued the whole way through. I want to know how Theo and Ash were working to solve their issues, but perhaps that’s for another book.
In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, and I definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good suspenseful historical fiction novel!