Part seafaring historical adventure and part modern-day love story, an enchanting tale of destiny and the power of love from bestselling French novelist Antoine Laurain. “Perfect for the poolside or sitting outside a café with a pastis and olives—and bound to give you just the same cheering lift.” — The Times In 1760, Guillaume le Gentil, astronomer to King Louis XV, sets sail for India. He hopes to record the transit of Venus, but rough seas—and war with the British—make his quest more complicated than he could have imagined. In the end he will live through 11 years of adventures and misadventures, travelling from France to India, India to the Philippines, enduring illness, shipwreck, and the loss of more than he could have imagined, before he returns home. 250 years later, anxious, lonely Xavier Lemercier chances upon Guillaume's telescope in a flea market. As he looks out across the rooftops of Paris, he glimpses an intriguing woman with a zebra in her apartment. Then she walks into his office, and his life changes forever. Xavier, a divorced single father struggling to keep his business afloat, will find meaning in pursuing the same quest as Guillaume did centuries earlier—the key to his heart lies in the transit of Venus (who, after all, was a love goddess). Part swashbuckling adventure on the high seas and part modern-day love story set in the heart of Paris, this is a time-travelling tale of adventure, destiny and the power of love. Antoine Laurain was born in Paris and is a journalist, antiques collector and award-winning author of ten novels, including The Red Notebook and The President's Hat . His books have been translated into 25 languages and sold more than 200,000 copies in English. He lives in Paris, France. Louise Rogers Lalaurie is a writer and translator from the French. She is based in France and the UK. Megan Jones is a translator. She lives in London. On the twenty-sixth of March 1760, Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de La Galaisière, astronomer to the Académie Royale des Sciences, boarded the fifty-gun ship Le Berryer in the French port of Lorient , bound for India. As the naval vessel put to sea, he just about managed to cling to the mast – his silver-buckled, patent-leather shoes had almost caused him to lose his footing on the slippery deck. A stiff Breton gale whipped his blue frock coat and lace jabot, and he pressed his right hand firmly to the crown of his three-cornered black felt hat. The start of a long and perilous voyage. When a man set sail to journey halfway around the globe, there was no knowing, in those days, whether he would be seen alive again. Guillaume Le Gentil was travelling on the orders of His Majesty Louis XV, charged with a precise mission – for which he was most uniquely qualified – to measure, with the aid of his telescopes and astronomical instruments, the true (rather than the supposed) distance from the Earth to the sun, on the occasion of the transit of Venus across our star. The small planet named for the Goddess of Love took an unusual sequence of turns across the sun’s disc, to say the least: one passage was followed by a second 8 years later, after which a whole 122 years would pass before the next. Then another 8 year interval, but after that, it would be 105 years until another transit could be observed. The alternating sequence of 8, 122 and 105 years was unchanged since the creation of the universe itself. Guillaume Le Gentil had taken every care not to miss the exceptional observations he would make from Pondicherry on 6 June 1761, more than a year after his departure from France. Thanks to which he might, perhaps, become the first man to measure the true distance between the Earth and the star that is the source of all its light. Everything was prepared down to the last detail, and yet nothing whatsoever would go as planned. Breathe. You are alive. Everything is fine. You are sitting down. Feel the weight of your body, the weight of your feet and your hands. Take note of the sounds that surround you. The familiar female voice was reassuring. It was the same for every session. Xavier Lemercier was on his fifteenth daily session of so-called ‘mindful’ meditation. This scientific practice had been one of his discoveries when he’d tried to quit smoking. Until now, Xavier had never got into meditation, and as a matter of principle he was hesitant about this sort of thing, imagining it to be full of obscure phrases, with echoes of the New Age and cheap shamanism. ‘Imagine you are a fox. Feel the flower within you.’ ‘Turn your heart towards the eternal Planet Gaia, nurturing mother of all living things.’ But that wasn’t the case with the app he had downloaded, the only goal of which was to establish thirty-minute pauses each day, and to quieten the frenetic buzz of thoughts that intruded upon every moment like so many wasps. Now the habit of returning to the voice and its soothing phrases was almost