Brookline Books/Lumen Editions

Pursuit Of A Woman On The Hinge Of History 

When Lucas, a down-at-heel New Yorker, catches a glimpse of a woman in a small Spanish town, his life is changed. Her overwhelming beauty gives sense to a world he had no longer been able to deal with. He tells himself this has nothing to do with "being interested in a woman." She is like someone from a distant past when men and women lived in a feminine-ruled world, before history became steered by male heroics. His only link to her is the man who was with her at the time, who turns out to be a billionaire financier, apparently set on buying up all the great art in the world. Lucas trails him through Europe and back to the States; the man appears to have become an enemy of the woman he was in with, and in the ensuing duel of wits, Lucas quickly becomes the loser. Yet ultimately—convicted of kidnapping and murder and sitting on death row in a Pennsylvania prison—Lucas is at last found by the woman he was searching for. 

Here is an intricate puzzle, desperate at times, of a strange humor at others. The novel, Koning's first in eight years, has elements of myth and mysticism, but has the same "intense passion" (The Atlantic Monthly), "humor" (The New Yorker), "intelligence" (Newsweek), and "artistic elegance" (New York Times) that has characterized his writing in such novels as The Petersburg-Cannes Express, The Kleber Flight, The Affair, and A Walk with Love and Death.