ON ANOTHER PAGE

Jean-Bogdan Wilkins is a tailor, a former mathematics teacher, an accidental murderer, and—depending on who remembers him—possibly someone else named Kazimir.

Names shift. Memories overlap. The past sometimes behaves like the future. In Jean’s world, page numbers are more reliable than calendars, and asking what you would do in someone else’s place may result in actually taking that person’s place. Jean learned this last rule the hard way when he took Meursault’s place and went to prison for a murder he had not, strictly speaking, committed.

There is one thing, however, that Jean never doubts: his wife, Eleanor, exists.

Then one day Eleanor dies.

Jean refuses to accept that page. Every attempt to save her only seems to create another route to the same ending. With the help of Morell and Wilbur, two friends who have some experience being other people, he eventually manages to keep Eleanor alive.

But by then Jean has started treating the plot as a problem that ought to have a solution. Every clue leads him to Bogdan Kazimir—a polite stranger with a disturbingly familiar name who visits Eleanor and reads to her from a book made entirely of blank pages.

Jean sees only one way out: write a book of his own and escape, with Eleanor, from the book they are in.