Elise

Elise Travers is a Boston hostess, admired and envied, married to Patrick, a young and wealthy entrepreneur. Their marriage rests on a secret. Elise will stay young for ever, while Patrick will grow old and die unless some medical miracle can be found.

Elise was born three hundred years earlier, at the Palace of Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV. She has lived alone with her gift of perpetual youth all that time. Now, for the first time, she is ready to risk everything to give it to the man she loves.

The novel runs on two tracks. The present-day thread is a suspense story with a chilling edge, built around that quest. Alongside it runs historical drama that moves through the Russia of Peter the Great, a slave uprising in French San Domingo, and a New Orleans brothel shortly after the War of 1812.

The quest carries dangers that Elise herself cannot fully foresee, to her and to the wider world. The book asks what immortality would cost, and it shows a horrifying side of the wish.