Barnes and Noble

On a snowy night in February, at the improbable point in lower Manhattan where Waverly Place intersects Waverly Place, Leo meets Veronica for the first time. Starkly beautiful, mysterious, aloof, she leads him into a world where illusion blends seamlessly with reality -- a luminously transformed city where powerful underground streams crisscross beneath the streets, a city of dragon-points and Tibetan mysticism, where real time is magically altered. Ten years have passed since Veronica's father, the famous magician Albin White, disappeared while performing a dangerous feat of time travel before a packed theater audience. White's disappearance was no accident. He was sabotaged by his apprentice Starwood, who interfered at a critical moment and sent him hurtling into the past, free to explore other eras but with no means of returning to the present.

Until Veronica finds Leo. Born in a year of unusual lunar cycles, Leo is the only person who can travel through time to contact White and receive his coded messages, messages that mobilize a remarkable cast of characters to help in his return: Veronica's brother Clement, a pickpocket who prints photographs from telepathic images; Keko, a blind Japanese courtesan with a passion for lunar cartography; and Otto, another master magician whose powers emanate from the number 8. Through them, Leo is sent to the Elizabethan England of Sir Walter Ralegh and his School of Night, to the fantastical vistas of ancient Tibet, and finally, back to the landscape of his own dreams and memories that have haunted him all his life.

Nicholas Christopher is one of America's pre-eminent poets. Interweaving themes of magic, intrigue, mysticism, and history, he leads us on a dazzling journey that is both a contemporary romance and a profound spiritual quest.

Reviews

"Black and white magic, time travel, the choicer arcana of Tibetan Buddhism, and a titanic struggle to the death at the top of the Empire State Building...Satisfying as the storytelling is, though, the deeper pleasures here stem from the author's imaginative and idiosyncratic scholarship, by means of which the uncanny is made to seem commonplace and the commonplace unfathomable."
--The New Yorker

"Hip, sexy...a novel in which anything can happen...Mr. Christopher is a superbly lyrical and descriptive writer."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Extraordinary…a dizzying, dazzling ride…an elegant, idiosyncratic work of art." -
--Chicago Tribune

"A fresh and innovative novel of our times...This is alchemist's fiction and Christopher becomes both scientist and magician, creating a novel of great force, a nonstop, exciting page-turner, and more."
--Booklist

Comments

"Nicholas Christopher has conjured a magical Borgesian realm where vectors of history align and synchronism reigns, where the hard-boiled detective novel meets the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the English School of Night, where time is a door continually opening and closeing.  Veronica is an achievement unlike anything else in contemporary American fiction.
--Edward Hirsch

"Nicholas Christopher's Veronica is an enigma wrapped in a mystery surrounded by delight. If you like mystery, magic, mayhem, and delicious puzzlement you will adore thisnovel.  Veronica is a spellbinding, spell-filled feast for the imagination."
--Randall Kenan

"In Veronica, Nicholas Christopher conjures a fantastic, dreamy Manhattan of shadows and secrets, angels and portents. Tibetan magic, dragon-points, hermetic traditions, time travel, new physics: Christopher's sleight of hand combines them all.  Veronica is a darkly glamourous labyrinth, a romance sparkling with mystery and surprise."
--Mark Doty

Read the opening pages of Veronica

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