Anna, Hanna, and Anny. Three young women, free spirits all, each one at odds with the age in which they live. Despite the centuries that divide them, in this book their stories intersect - a delightful narrative technique that lends rich layers to this moving novel, building to a thrilling crescendo of unexpected revelations. Anne lives in Flanders in the sixteenth century. She's a mystic who talks with animals like Saint Francis; she finds God in nature and cannot understand the need for religious rituals. Yet her ideas run against the temper of the times. It is the age of the counterreformation and the Inquisition. Her innate serenity provokes people's jealousy, with tragic consequences.

Hanna lives in Vienna at the start of the twentieth century. She is a young noblewoman, dissatisfied with bourgeois conventions, who undertakes a journey of self-discovery. After much sadness she will find a method for uncovering the roots of her malaise in a new cure developed by a Viennese doctor by the name of Sigmund Freud. Anny is a Hollywood star of our time. Addicted to celebrity and to variety of illicit substances, she is searching for meaning in world where the only apparent thing of any value is money. Both her comfort and her curse, acting will give her the key to open a new chapter in her life, one that promises companionship and a much sought-after sense of meaning. Praise for Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt 'There is a surprising sweetness to Schmitt's stories of redemption and reconciliation. They carry a slight pleasant aftertaste, a lingering hint of delight.

' The Boston Globe 'Schmitt's stories capture a quirky, clever, feminist, very French sensibility.' Publishers Weekly 'Concerto in Memory of an Angel cannot fail to delight anyone who likes their literature 'with accompaniment' (it really does make a superb concerto), as well as all those - and they are many - who ponder the meaning of life . A small masterpiece.' Le Parisien 'Moral fables, gilded mini-legends: Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's stories are fiendishly efficient. Schmitt is a prodigious story-teller with a style both elegant and assured.' Les Echos.