Lost Paradise A Novel

"In Lost Paradise, his most ambitious book yet, Cees Nooteboom sets out to connect two seemingly unrelated strangers whom he has glimpsed on his travels - a beautiful woman aboard a Berlin-bound flight and a haggard-looking man on a Holland train platform - and to explore the major impact that small interactions can have on the course of our journeys." "The beautiful woman becomes Alma, a young woman of German descent, who leaves her parents' Sao Paolo home on a hot summer night in a fit of depression. Her engine dies in one of the city's most dangerous favelas, a mob surrounds her, and she is pulled from the car. To escape her memory of the assault that follows, she flees across the world to Australia, where she becomes involved in the beautiful but bizarre Angel Project. Not long after, Dutch literary critic Erik Zontag is in Perth, Australia, for a conference. He has found a winged woman curled up in a closet in an empty house. He reaches out, and for a second allows his fingertips to brush her feathers - and then she speaks." "Years later, Erik is still reeling from the fleeting encounter he had with that mysterious woman. Disenchanted with his work and desperately in need of a reprieve from his drinking, he leaves his young girlfriend in Amsterdam and heads for a secluded spa in the forests of Austria. There he finds himself alone in a room with a masseuse whose voice he has heard once before, in a place so far away it seems like a different lifetime - but which Erik has never been able to forget. The intersection of their paths illuminates the ways in which the divine touches our lives."--BOOK JACKET.Nooteboom, Cees is the author of 'Lost Paradise A Novel', published 2007 under ISBN 9780802118554 and ISBN 0802118550.