For weeks after the sinking of the Titanic, Yorick spots his own name among the list of those lost at sea. As an apprentice librarian for the White Star Line, his job was to curate the ship’s second-class library. But the day the Titanic set sail, he was left stranded at the dock. After the ship’s sinking, Yorick takes this twist of fate as a sign to follow his lifelong dream of owning a bookshop in Paris. Soon after, he receives an invitation to a secret society of survivors where he encounters other ticket holders who didn’t board the ship. Haunted by their good fortune, they decide to form a book society, where they can grapple with their own anxieties. But with the Great War on the horizon and the unexpected death of one of their own, the surviving book club members are left wondering what fate might have in store.

Clementine is a 72-year-old reformed con artist. Her life of crime has led her from the uber-wealthy perfume junkies of belle epoque Manhattan, to the scented butterflies of Costa Rica, to the spice markets of Marrakech, and finally to the bordellos of Paris, where she settles down in 1930 and opens a shop bottling her favorite extracts for the ladies of the cabarets. Now it's 1941, and Clem's favorite haunt, Madame Boulette's, is crawling with Nazis, while her people --- the outsiders, the artists and the hustlers who used to call it home --- are disappearing. Clem believes she's too old to put up a fight. But when the cabaret's prize songbird, Zoe St. Angel, recruits her to steal the recipe book of a now-missing famous Parisian perfumer, she can't say no.

The 1898 Omaha World’s Fair has just concluded. In a small Nebraska town, a Civil War balloon formerly on display at the Fair lands on the home of two elderly sisters. The pilot is Ferret Skerritt, a young ventriloquist. In THE SWAN GONDOLA, Ferret tells the sisters the story of his romance with an actress who worked at the Chamber of Horrors, and of the wealthy magnate who tried to insinuate himself into their affair.