Three Women in a Mirror by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt

Schmitt is a prodigious story-teller with a style both elegant and assured.'-Les Echos, 'There is a surprising sweetness to Schmitt's stories of redemption and reconciliation. A small masterpiece.'Le Parisien 'Moral fables, gilded mini-legends: Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's stories are fiendishly efficient. They carry a slight pleasant aftertaste, a lingering hint of delight.'-The Boston Globe 'Schmitt's stories capture a quirky, clever, feminist, very French sensibility.'-Publishers Weekly 'Concerto in Memory of an Angel cannot fail to delight anyone who likes their literature 'with accompaniment' (it really does make a superb concerto), as well as all those-and they are many-who ponder the meaning of life. 'There is a surprising sweetness to Schmitt's stories of redemption and reconciliation.

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, author of three collections of short stories published by Europa Editions, including The Most Beautiful Book in the World, tells the stories of three women searching for ways to express their uniqueness and to wrest free of the expectations and limitations that their respective eras impose. Both her comfort and her curse, acting will give her the key to a open a new chapter in her life, where she will find love, companionship, and the meaning she has been searching for. Addicted to celebrity and to variety of illicit substances, she is searching for meaning in world where the only apparent thing of any value is money. After much sadness she will find a method for uncovering the roots of her malaise in a new cure developed by a Viennese doctor by the name of Sigmund Freud. She is a young noblewoman, dissatisfied with bourgeois conventions, who undertakes a journey of self-discovery. Hanna lives in Vienna at the start of the twentieth century. Her serenity and the loose tongues of those who secretly envy her result in her being branded a heretic, with tragic consequences. It is the age of the counterreformation and the Inquisition. Yet her ideas run against the temper of the times. She's a mystic who talks with animals like Saint Francis she finds God in nature and cannot understand the need for religious rituals. Anne lives in Flanders in the sixteenth century.

Despite the centuries that divide them, their stories intersect-a surprising narrative technique that lends increasing tension and richness to this novel, which builds to a thrilling crescendo of unexpected revelations. Three young women, free spirits all, each one at odds with the age in which they live.

Three Women in a Mirror by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt