A Short Walk Through a Wide World

If you could never stay, where would you go? The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue meets The Midnight Library in this dazzlingly epic debut novel.

Paris, 1885: Aubry Tourvel, a spoiled and stubborn nine-year-old girl, comes across a wooden puzzle ball on her walk home from school. She tosses it over the fence, only to find it in her satchel that evening. Days later, at the family dinner table, she begins to succumb to a mysterious illness.

When a visit to a doctor only makes her worse, she flees to the outskirts of the city, where she realises that it is this very act of movement that keeps her alive. And so begins her incredible lifelong journey on the run from her condition.

From the scorched dunes of the Calanshio Sand Sea to the snow-packed peaks of the Himalayas; from a bottomless well in a Parisian courtyard, to the shelves of an infinite underground library, we follow Aubry as she learns what it takes to survive and, ultimately, to truly live. But the longer she wanders, the clearer it becomes that the world she travels through may not be quite the same as everyone else’s…

‘Gorgeous… I savoured every page of this book!’

SHELBY VAN PELT, author of Remarkably Bright Creatures