The Travels of Daniel Ascher

A sensation in France, this is a story about literary deceptions, family secrets, and a thrilling quest for the truth

Who is the real author of The Black Insignia? Is it H. R. Sanders, whose name is printed on the cover of every installment of the wildly successful young adult adventure series? Or is it Daniel Roche, the enigmatic world traveler who disappears for months at a time? When Daniel’s great-niece, Hélène, moves to Paris to study archeology, she does not expect to be searching for answers to these questions. As rumors circulate, however, that the twenty-fourth volume of The Black Insignia series will be the last, Hélène and her friend Guillaume, a devoted fan of her great-uncle’s books, set out to discover more about the man whose life eludes her. In so doing, she uncovers an explosive secret dating back to the darkest days of the Occupation.

In recounting the moment when one history began and another ended, The Travels of Daniel Ascher explores the true nature of fiction: is it a refuge, a lie, or a stand-in for mourning?"Haunting...the narrative reads like a mash-up of Sarah's Key and The Book Thief, and it adroitly straddles the line between adult and YA literature. A piercing meditation on memory and history." —Publishers Weekly

"[Déborah] Lévy-Bertherat has written an engaging yet ultimately melancholy and moving novel about a search for meaning with its roots buried in WWII France. A slender story but a satisfying one." —Booklist

"[Déborah] Lévy-Bertherat's debut novel is a story about storytelling—both historical and personal...The best moments in Lévy-Bertherat's short novel involve people falling into stories...The writing is lovely." —Kirkus Reviews

"All fiction readers will love [The Travels of Daniel Ascher]." —Library Journal

"[A] tightly layered debut novel...With an emphasis on our simultaneous needs to disguise our suffering and tell our stories, Lévy-Bertherat highlights a most human conundrum in a mystery whose resolution will fill readers with sorrow and hope." —Shelf Awareness

“The Travels of Daniel Ascher is about the power of stories, particularly the ones we tell about ourselves. Within its svelte form, the novel packs in a love story (several actually), a family story, a war story, a mystery, a travelogue, and even a convincingly imagined children's adventure series. All these strands weave together beautifully in this deftly plotted and deeply moving novel.” —Gabrielle Zevin, author of The Fabled Life of A.J. Fikry

“A startling, beautifully written novel that starts as a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens and ends in a plunge into the dark, mysterious world of wartime Paris. A real thriller.” —Anka Muhlstein, author of Monsieur Proust’s Library

"Bewitching, charming." —Elle (France)

"Déborah Lévy-Bertherat has a bright literary future." —Lire

"A novel rich in reflections on identity, memory, and the power of fiction." —Le Figaro

“A novel one reads in one sitting that brings us back to the time when traveling meant opening a book.” —Le Libraire (Quebec)Déborah Lévy-Bertherat lives in Paris, where she teaches comparative literature at the École Normale Supérieure. She has translated Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and Gogol’s Petersburg Tales into French. The Travels of Daniel Ascher is her first novel.
 
Adriana Hunter studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated more than fifty books including Eléctrico W by Hervé Le Tellier (winner of the French-American Foundation’s 2013 Translation Prize in Fiction). She won the 2011 Scott Moncrieff Prize and has been short-listed twice for the Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize. She lives in Norfolk, England.It wasn’t actually boredom that had made Hélène give up on The Ferrymen of the Amazon. The scant chapter she’d once read, a dozen or so pages, had made her feel short of breath, stifling under some burden. The story began with a catastrophe: a twin-engine plane flying over the Amazon rainforest stalls and crashes into the trees. The pilot and two photographers are killed, Peter Ashley-Mill is the only survivor. Despite deep wounds to his arm and chest, he manages to find the strength, wielding an axe, to hack his way through the climbers and giant trees, not sure whether he will find any humans, nor how they will receive him. Starving, hunched and in pain, he battles on, sometimes resting his hand on the oozing wound close to his heart, under his torn shirt. When he is collapsing with hunger, he digs up roots. Even though the parrots taunt him, You’re going to die, Peter, you’re going to die, he holds on, determined to survive at all costs so he can report the tragic deaths of his companions. But, overcome by exhaustion, pain and fever, he loses consciousness. A huge anaconda eases down from a branch and slowly wraps itself around his body.
           
She didn’t get any further, but the story haunted her all through her teenage years, she still sometimes dreamed that she was fighting through a hostile jungle, plying her way through the tree trunks and climbers, digging into the ground to find roots, to no avail.