Recipient of the KIRKUS STAR. Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best of 2011. From Kirkus Reviews: A French journalist encounters the American Civil War-and something even stranger-in 1861 Kentucky. Edouard de Grimouville, a supercilious French stringer for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, travels to the town of Somerset, Ky., on the eve of the Civil War-a conflict in which the neutral state is coveted by both sides. The newspaper's better-known, more diligent and more talented (monsieur is somewhat lackadaisical) reporters are covering the higher-profile areas of the state, leaving de Grimouville...

Cities never shed their pasts. They are marked by their histories. You do not walk through them and remain wholly in the present.

In 1966, as the war in Vietnam escalates, twelve-year-old Holzli Lloyd's family moves to Switzerland where his father is a cultural attache with the American consulate, a job that seems to have hidden dimensions.

Transferred from a village public school to an international school in Zurich, the boy meets Mark, who claims to have visions of the sixteenth century, the time of the Swiss Reformation. Mark tells of meetings with a girl named Regula,...