Indelible

Magdalena has an unsettling gift: she sees the truth about people written on their skin, including names, dates and details both trivial and profound. Her only relief from the flood of information is to take off her glasses and let the world blur. Her own skin, mercifully, is blank. When she meets Neil, she is startled to find her name written on his cheek.

Neil is spending the summer in Paris studying a medieval pilgrimage to the coast of Spain, where the body of Saint Jacques is said to have washed ashore covered in scallop shells. Magdalena is desperate to make amends after the death of her best friend, a tragedy she might have prevented, and sets out on a pilgrimage of her own. Before she goes, Neil falls for her, taken with her pale eyes, her Eastern European accent and the heartbreak that surrounds her.

Neil's father, Richard, is also in Paris, searching for the truth about his late mother, a famous expatriate American novelist who abandoned him at birth. All his life he has held on to one memory of her, her red shoes, which her biographers agree he could never have seen.

In this debut novel by Adelia Saunders, secrets surface in forgotten texts in the Paris archives, on a dusty cattle ranch in the American West, along ancient pilgrim paths and in a run-down apartment in post-Soviet Lithuania. By chance, or perhaps fate, the characters converge, and Magdalena's strange ability may hold the key to their happiness.