De Potter's Grand Tour: A Novel

"Only one of our wisest, deftest, most knowing prose stylists at the height of her powers could have invented for readers the utterly beguiling experience that is De Potter's Grand Tour ... One of the most delightful books I've read in years."-Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule

In 1905, a tourist agent and amateur antiques collector named Armand de Potter mysteriously disappears off the coast of Greece. His body is never recovered, and his wife, Aimée, 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 Armand had said. Infused with details from letters and diary entries, their story 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.

Told with masterful agility, De Potter's Grand Tour is a tale as grand as the tour guide at its center. Drawing on real documents only recently discovered, Joanna Scott points delicately toward the story's historical basis and unfolds a detective tale of the highest order.