Alex Landragin: Crossings

Alex Landragin CrossingsI didn’t write this book. I stole it…

A Parisian bookbinder stumbles across a manuscript containing three stories, each as unlikely as the other.

The first, The Education of a Monster, is a letter penned by the poet Charles Baudelaire to an illiterate girl. The second, City of Ghosts, is a noir romance set in Paris in 1940 as the Germans are invading.

The third, Tales of the Albatross, is the strangest of the three: the autobiography of a deathless enchantress. Together, they tell the tale of two lost souls peregrinating through time.

An unforgettable tour de force with echoes of Roberto Bolaño, David Mitchell and Umberto Eco, Crossings is a novel in three parts, designed to be read in two different directions, spanning a hundred and fifty years and seven lifetimes.

“Audacious, ambitious and spellbinding, Crossings isn’t just a complex literary thriller, an intriguing puzzle, or a thoroughly enjoyable romantic alternative history of Paris and the Pacific islands, but all of these things at once.” – Jane Rawson


Alex Landragin is a French-Armenian-Australian writer. Born in France into a family of champagne-makers, he migrated to western Victoria as a child. Alex has previously worked as a travel writer for Lonely Planet, authoring travel guides in Australia, Europe and Africa. His travel journalism and essays have appeared in The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Alex currently resides in Melbourne, Australia, and has also lived in Washington DC, Paris, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Alice Springs and Marseille. His first novel Crossings is the result of his blog, The Daily Fiction Project – for which he wrote and published a story every day for eight months. When not writing, Alex plays jazz piano under the name Tenderloin Stomp, specializing in the music of Jelly Roll Morton.


Crossings is published by Picador Australia and is available from all leading book retailers including Booktopia.

Image: Alex Landragin: Crossings – courtesy of Picador Australia