Ysabel

Ned Marriner is fifteen and has come to Provence with his father, a celebrated photographer shooting a book on the cathedral of Saint-Sauveur at Aix. Wandering the building while the crew works, he meets Kate Wenger, an American exchange student with a useful grasp of local history, and then a man with a knife who addresses them as if he has been waiting for a very long time. Ned's family have blundered into the latest turn of a story that has repeated in this landscape since before the Romans: two men, Phelan and Cadell, who love the same woman and have killed each other for her over and over, and Ysabel herself, who returns in a borrowed body and must be found within three days. Aix and the Sainte-Victoire and the Roman ruins at Entremont are the board. Kay, whose usual practice is invented history at epic length, writes here in the present day and at a young adult's shoulder, and connects the book quietly to his own earlier work through Ned's aunt. It is smaller than his other novels and unexpectedly moving about landscape: the argument that some places remember, and hold what happened in them.