Like his father before him Octavio runs the Notre-Dame bakery & knows the secret recipe for the perfect Parisian baguette. But also like his father Octavio has never mastered the art of reading & his only knowledge of the world beyond the bakery door comes from his own imagination. Just a few streets away Isabeau works out of sight in the basement of the Louvre trying to forget her disfigured beauty by losing herself in the paintings she restores & the stories she reads. The two might never have met but for a curious chain of coincidences involving an impoverished painter a jaded bookseller & a book of fairytales lost & found... Evocative romantic & wise this is a magical novel about the power of stories
- to help us find enchantment freedom & sometimes even love.