As fake as all the corbels, trefoils, lancets, spandrels, voussoirs, vergeboards, chevrons, crockets, mouchettes, buttresses, clerestories, balustres, architraves, cupolas of this Potemkin village his mind seemed determined to erect at every turn. There were bridges, empty parks, railway lines, boat horns echoing in a distance calculated to sound fake. A fabric of The Combinations is the stuff that nightmares are made of… Prague, dirty old town: at night Kafkian spectres and alchemical apparitions stroll all over the place…And the dark shadow of golem presides over them all. “Kafka’s The Trial meets Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.” The Combinations is a text whose 1) erudition dazzles, 2) structure humbles, 3) monotony never bores, 4) humour disarms, 5) relentlessness overwhelms, 6) storytelling captivates, 7) poignancy remains poignant, and 8) style simply never exhausts itself. Armand’s prose weaves together the City’s thousand-and-one fascinating tales with a deeply personal account of one lost soul set adrift amid the early-90s’ awakening from the nightmare that was the previous half-century of communist Mitteleuropa. Reinhard) of the 20th (who attempted and succeeded in turning flesh into soap). Edward) of the 16th/17th centuries (who attempted and failed to turn lead into gold), and the infamous H’s (e.g. Golem City, the ship of fools boarded by the famed D’s (e.g. “Golem City”), across the 20th-century and before/after. The can’t-look-away story of three entangled families living in a house with the darkest of secrets.In 8 octaves, 64 chapters and on 888 + xxxvii pages, Louis Armand’s The Combinations is a “work of attempted fiction” that combines the beauty & intellectual exertion that is chess with the panorama of futility & chaos that is Prague (a.k.a. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note.

When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom.

Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. But what she can’t possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well-and she is on a collision course to meet them. Everything in Libby’s life is about to change. She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am. Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she’s been waiting for her entire life.

The family upstairs pages