Notes

332 pages Summary: A suspenseful, mesmerising story of a great quest for meaning, told in three intersecting narratives. It begins in the early 1900s, when Tomas discovers an ancient journal that hints at the existence of an extraordinary artifact that - if he can find it - would redefine history. He sets out from Lisbon in one of the very first motor cars in Portugal in search of the strange treasure the journal describes. Thirty-five years later, a pathologist devoted to the novels of Agatha Christie, whose wife has possibly been murdered, finds himself drawn into Tomas's quest. Fifty years later, Senator Peter Tovy of Ottawa, grieving the death of his own beloved wife, rescues a chimpanzee from an Oklahoma research facility and takes it to live with him in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, where the strands of all three stories miraculously mesh together. (Publisher)