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2.5 

The Knowledge of Water

By Sarah Smith
The Knowledge of Water by Sarah Smith digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

"I will marry you," Perdita Halley said to Alexander von Reisden at eighteen, "but not until I study music." Now, at twenty-one, she has come to Paris, his city--but music still stands between them. She is pursuing her dream of becoming a concert pianist; he is trying for the less likely one of becoming an ordinary, unhaunted man. They are drawn into an all-consuming passion that seems destined for tragedy. Perdita cannot marry and attend the Conservatoire; Alexander, still haunted by his past, fears to marry at all.

As incessant rain dims the City of Lights, an intricate network of plots and counterplots swirls around the couple. And an elegant game of art and life turns deadly, as a madman follows them, threatening to destroy them both in retribution for a murder they know nothing about--

Or do they?

New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Bonus materials for book clubs. Additional materials available online.

4 Reviews

2.5
“Started off slow but picked up. It was going pretty good, but the culmination (and solving the mystery of who was the painter) fell flat. The ending kind of dragged. Did find the history of the great flood in Paris in 1910 really interesting. I didn't know that happened. It wasn't enough to save the book for me though--it felt more like the author did a lot of research and wanted to fit it in somehow.”

About Sarah Smith

SARAH SMITH STARTED TELLING stories as a child in Japan. Her sitter would tell her ghost stories at night, and the next morning she’d act them out on the school bus for an audience of terrified five-year-olds. Back in America, she lived in an unrestored Victorian house, where every morning she would help her grandmother haul coal and break sticks into kindling to light the household stove. She’s loved storytelling and history ever since.

She studied English at Harvard, where she spent Saturdays in the library reading mysteries, and film in London and Paris, where she sat next to Peter Cushing at a film show and got to pet Francis Bacon’s cat. While teaching English, she got interested in personal computers; she and two friends bought 3 of the first 5 PCs sold in Boston. She realized that software could help her plot bigger stories, and she’s never looked back.

Her bestselling series of Edwardian mysteries, starring Alexander von Reisden and Perdita Halley, has been published in 14 languages. Two of the books have been named New York Times Notable Books. The Vanished Child, the first book in the series, is being made into a musical in Canada. Sarah’s young adult ghost thriller, The Other Side of Dark, has won both the Agatha (for best YA mystery of the year) and the Massachusetts Book Award for best YA book of the year. Her Chasing Shakespeares, a novel about the Shakespeare authorship, has been called “the best novel about the Bard since Nothing like the Sun” (Samuel R. Delany) and has been turned into a play. 

Sarah lives in Boston with her family.

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