A novel by Clayton Van Hook
Something of This Time to Keep
Across three lifetimes, love finds its way home.
The Story
A love that refuses to stay buried.
In a Paris spring, an American named Dermot Foley looks up at the gargoyles of Notre Dame and is hit, without warning, by a stranger’s blue eyes. He does not yet know that the recognition he feels is older than the cathedral — that Anna has been someone to him before, and will be again.
Spanning Paris and Moscow, wartime France and 1980s America, Something of This Time to Keep follows a soul’s persistent search for the people who once defined it. As Dermot and Anna are pulled into a widening circle of artists, spies, exiles, and children of the next generation, the novel asks what we owe the lives we don’t remember living — and what, in the end, is worth carrying forward.
It is a story about intuition and déjà vu, about the imponderable barrier between our souls and our consciousness, and about the moment — sudden, profound — when that barrier briefly thins.
“Not only is the universe stranger than we think; it is stranger than we can think.”
Excerpt
Chapter One — Paris, 2013
It may not be for us to ever know why people in our lives come and go. Dermot Foley never gave a thought to the matter until coming face-to-face with the swirling forces of attraction. Surrounded by the ageless mystique of a Parisian spring, Foley stood before the weathered magnificence of Notre Dame’s gothic façade. Chestnut blossoms dusted teeming sidewalks as trees of every sort exploded in new leaves. Rainbow tulips reached for the sun.
Swarms of tourists hovered near guides speaking English, German, and Japanese. Cologned with lavender, steak frites, and burning tobacco, a sedentary mélange of people dallied at umbrellaed café tables. Pope Alexander III helped lay the first stone at the site of a Roman temple in 1163 before generations of architects and craftsmen labored 170 years to complete the flying-buttressed masterwork.
From the shadows nearby another pair of eyes focused intently on the lanky American. As a compass needle seeks magnetic north, Foley’s head was drawn to his right. The sight of her jellied his legs, and he pulled an arm upward. Time seemed to brake — creeping like molasses — as a woman he’d never seen before drilled through him with impossibly blue eyes.
Don’t stare, he thought, look away. But he could not.
Praise
Early readers on Something of This Time to Keep.
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“A novel that moves like memory itself — patient, then suddenly luminous. Van Hook writes about recognition with the conviction of someone who has felt it.”
— Reader review
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“An ambitious meditation on souls, history, and the people we keep meeting across time. The Paris sequences alone are worth the journey.”
— Reader review
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“Rare among contemporary novels for taking its central premise seriously. The result is tender, strange, and quietly devastating.”
— Reader review
Editorial blurbs and reader reviews for the forthcoming revised second edition will appear here as they arrive.