The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

"Addie LaRue was born in France at the very end of the 17th century – but no one remembers that. Addie has traded her soul for immortality, but she didn’t realize that the hidden price is her legacy – for she is doomed to be instantly forgotten by everyone she meets as she slips through the centuries. It’s a bit cheeky to call this book Faust for romantic bisexual goths, but it’s not wrong. Meta and elegant, it reveals itself like the prestige of a particularly elegant magic trick, leaving us with the feeling that we, too, have been part of Addie’s long and invisible life."

"It does, a little bit of magical realism. This is quite different from the others I’m recommending. It begins in 1714 France, but half the story is told in the present day, while the young woman we know as Addie LaRue tries to find her place in the world. The gist of the story is that Addie was born in the 1700s, was about to be married off in an unwilling way, but made a deal with the devil. She’s never going to die, but the price she pays is that no one will ever remember her. She takes the deal because it gets her out of a terrible situation, but then she proceeds to pay for it dearly for 300 years. So it’s a story of loneliness—who you are when you cannot form a relationship over time. It’s the story of memory—who you are when you meet the same people over and over, but it’s like they are meeting you for the first time. And then, of course, it’s a story about legacy—who you are when there’s nothing to be remembered. But my favourite parts of this story are the historical elements. We see Addie navigating 300 years in time: what she has to do to survive as she navigates an ever-changing world around her. I thought it was so clever, so creative. I think it’s one of the best premises I’ve come across in the last ten years. I loved reading it. I realised quite late that I had always loved history and learning. One of my favourite quotes is from Rudyard Kipling, that “if history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” A good history lesson is just a good story. So, I’ve always loved to write, I’ve always loved history, and at some point I realised that writing historical fiction allowed me to fill in the gaps in my own education. No one gets through their education having learned everything. For me, I have an ongoing opportunity to plug those holes. I’ve written about the jazz era in New York City. I got to write a novel set on the last flight of the Hindenburg. I got to write about the Romanovs during the Russian Revolution . I’ve written two novels set during World War Two , one in France and the other in the Philippines. Now I’ve written about post-Revolutionary War America, and I’m currently working in medieval Ireland. So it becomes the world’s best kind of homework, the kind I want to do."