Stowaways

This contemporary twist on A Brief Encounter is a tender meditation on what might have been.





'Maybe we love people because they won't let us know them.'





A summer's evening in Manhattan. Nothing - not cold drinks, not showers not a stroll through the chilly aisles of an all-night drugstore - can undo the heat's hold on the city. Julian is half watching the evening news, his husband filling the dishwasher. That's when it arrives. An email with the subject line: 'From Paul Axel'. An email about a dead man from Chloe - a woman Julian has never met. Paul has left a message he'd like her to relay.





Emails are exchanged. Morning coffee at the Bryant Park Grill is agreed. Chloe, fulfilling Paul's final request, wonders how she will tell Julian of a life - and a love - he has no idea existed. A life, encased in a flash drive, containing multitudes.



André Aciman is the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name, Find Me, The Gentleman from Peru,Room on the Sea, Out of Egypt, Eight White Nights, False Papers, Alibis, Harvard Square, Enigma Variations, and the essay collection Homo Irrealis. He's the editor of The Proust Project and teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife in Manhattan.