Everything The Wind Carries

When heritage conservationist Rebecca Voss arrives in Lisbon with thirty days and a condemned building to save, she carries the specific loneliness of a woman who has learned to fight for everything except herself. The building at Rua do Ferro 14, a nineteenth-century azulejo-tiled townhouse in the oldest quarter of the city, has been scheduled for demolition to make way for a hotel development. Becky intends to stop it.

What she does not intend is what the building gives back.

In the flat above hers lives Sebastian Ward, a British-American novelist who published one extraordinary book eight years ago and has not written since. He has come to Lisbon because no one he knows has ever run into anyone they know in Lisbon. He is also, very slowly, beginning to understand why he has really come.

As Becky's investigation uncovers a sixty-year-old underground archive, the hand-drawn maps of a resistance network, and a packet of Dutch letters from 1971 signed only M, she begins to understand that she has arrived at this building for reasons deeper than any heritage case can account for. The building has been keeping something for fifty years. It has been keeping it for her.

Spanning contemporary Lisbon and the Estado Novo dictatorship, Everything the Wind Carries asks what we preserve, what we let fall, and why the two questions are always the same. It is a novel about grief relearned and love rebuilt slowly, about the architecture of memory and the specific courage of staying in the place that has found you. About the things that remain when everything that was fragile has been tested. About the particular bravery required to love again after loss.

Some things are worth saving. Some things must fall. This is a book about knowing the difference.