Anna, Hanna, and Anny. Three young women, free spirits all, each one at
odds with the age in which they live. Despite the centuries that divide
them, their stories intersect--a surprising narrative technique that
lends increasing tension and richness to this novel, which builds to a
thrilling crescendo of unexpected revelations.
Anne lives in Flanders in the sixteenth century. She's a mystic who
talks with animals like Saint Francis; she finds God in nature and
cannot understand the need for religious rituals. Yet her ideas run
against the temper of the times. It is the age of the counterreformation
and the Inquisition. Her serenity and the loose tongues of those who
secretly envy her, result in her being branded a heretic, with tragic
consequences. Hanna lives in Vienna at the start of the twentieth
century. She is a young noblewoman, dissatisfied with bourgeois
conventions, who undertakes a journey of self-discovery. After much
sadness she will find a method for uncovering the roots of her malaise
in a new cure developed by a Viennese doctor by the name of Sigmund
Freud. Anny is a Hollywood star of the 2000s. Addicted to celebrity and
to variety of illicit substances she is searching for meaning in world
where the only apparent thing of any value is money. Both her curse and
her solace, acting will give her the key to a open a new chapter in her
life where she will find love, companionship, and the meaning she has
been searching for.
