A time traveler meets a sleeping beauty meets a vampire. In Paris.

Restless and unwilling to accept a raw deal, Provençal mountain girl Ysabelet flees a forced marriage, hitching a ride to Paris with a traveling apothecary whose cart is ladened with miraculous substances. Young shepherd Arnaud, under the influence of an uncanny celestial object, begins to skip through time. Their paths cross in 19th century Paris where Ysabelet is employed as a beguiling au pair laboring under a perverse unnatural being with a dark secret. Centuries later, their paths will cross again. And centuries after that, possibly another time.

Beginning in 14th century Provence and leaping with understated virtuosity to Paris in the 19th and 20th and 21^st and 22nd centuries (and a few other centuries besides), Jack B. Donovan’s gorgeous epic of uncontrollable and unwished-for time travel is a triumph of imagination, by turns humorous, fast-paced, ravishing and strange.

A boundless love story and an adventure that plumbs the existential implications of time, Comet of Occitania is a work of literary fiction for anyone who has known the feeling of being suspended in a series of nows, the meaning of one moment disconnected from the next.

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