the Four O'Clock Woman: A Novel of Belle Époque

Paris, 1893. She is there every Tuesday and Friday, and she will not tell him anything.François de Valcourt has a title, a ruined family, and forty-one pages of a novel he will never finish. He is to marry a dye manufacturer's daughter in October. It is a good arrangement and everyone knows exactly what it is.Then, in a market café at four o'clock in the morning, he sees a small red-haired woman drinking chocolate - and the clock stops.She is warm. She is funny. She reads four languages and will not say which. She gives him nothing at all, and out of that nothing he writes the book that makes him famous across Europe.Three years later she comes back. She has not aged a day. And she is carrying a copy of his own novel, printed a hundred and seventeen years in the future.A love story about the hour that belongs to nobody, and about what a man will take from a woman who told him her life was not for sale.