De Potter's Grand Tour - Hardcover

"Joanna Scott is a writer to treasure and her beguiling new novel is an intrepid exploration of the world, of the past, and of the human heart." --Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl "Joanna Scott's writing is always a wonder, but this, with its hints of Hawthorne's 'Wakefield, ' is her best yet: a wizardly dialogue between fact and fiction, the known and the unknown. I'll be haunted by her elusive, touching, and deluded hero for a long time." --Andrea Barrett, author of Archangel and Ship Fever "Joanna Scott is the great tour guide of contemporary American fiction, navigating us across oceans of memory and longing. She doesn't sail around the reefs and shoals but steers us right for them, keeping every promise that we'll emerge on the other side intact, if not quite the same as before. In the company of Aim e de Potter as she intrepidly searches for her husband's ghost and secrets, Scott charts here one of her grandest tours yet, one more utterly singular story only she could have written." --Steve Erickson, author of These Dreams of You "Like some exquisite and mysterious tapestry that Armand de Potter himself might have admired on one of his journeys, Joanna Scott's new novel masterfully weaves an irresistible story of love, secrecy, ambition, and devastating folly. De Potter's Grand Tour coalesces history and imagination with such brilliant clarity that a world now long lost seems like a personal experience freshly remembered. Joanna Scott is a magician, a conjurer, one of the very best writers at work today." --Bradford Morrow, author of The Diviner's Tale "Only one of our wisest, deftest, most knowing prose stylists at the height of her powers could have invented the utterly beguiling experience that is De Potter's Grand Tour. Joanna Scott has given us a daringly original and serious novel that in its magical rendering of the interior voices of a Gilded Age European adventurer and his American wife is as credible and moving as it is historically astute. One of the most delightful books I've read in years." --Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule "What a whirl of a book, full of secrets and surprises. I read De Potter's Grand Tour in a couple of days, losing myself in its pages, sorry to see the last words run like swift water under the bridge where I lingered, novel in hand. Joanna Scott is among the handful of American writers I will always want to read, and here she offers a capacious circumnavigation of a world tinged by melancholy, love, mystery, shimmering beauty, and unlikely passion. A lovely and strangely affecting read." --Jay Parini, author of The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year "Joanna Scott's forthcoming novel, De Potter's Grand Tour, is a delicate, enchanting, utterly delicious text, melancholy at the heart and yet slyly funny. Scott is of course a fearlessly intelligent writer, and this book is surely one of her finest. An aching quandary at its center, a question of love and abandonment involving exotic travel." --Louise Erdrich, Birchbark Books Blog

In 1905, a tourist agent and amateur antiques collector named Armand de Potter mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Greece. His body is never recovered and his wife is left to manage his affairs on her own. But as she starts to piece together his life, she realizes that everything was not as he had said. Infused with details from letters and diary entries, the narrative twists forward and backward through time, revealing a lost world of fake identities, underground antiques networks, and a husband who wasn't what he seemed. Originally from Belgium, young Armand de Potter comes to New York without a penny in his pocket. With cunning ambition, he quickly makes a name for himself as both a worldwide travel guide and a trusted - if illegal-antiques dealer. After marrying, he moves the family to a luxurious villa in Cannes and embraces an aristocratic life. But as he grows increasingly entangled in the antiques trade and his touring business begins to falter, Armand's control starts to fray. As the world closes in, he believes he only has one option left.