A novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the
reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark
colony on the moon three hundred years later,
unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and
space. Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when
he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from
polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a
dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the
beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly
hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship
terminal-an experience that shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive
Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over
Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a
place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial
beauty. Within the text of Olive's bestselling
pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays
his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an
airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around
him. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in
the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in
the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series
of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to
madness, a writer trapped far from home as a
pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend
from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has
glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary
that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
