Mistletoe-gathering; an elixir of youth that smacks unmistakably of Gaul; druids meeting under spreading oaks… Noam stares in wonder at the fabulous Celtic world when he turns up in Gaul. But before long, invaders of a very different kind burst on to the scene: the Romans arrive to upset the balance of powers.

From Spartacus, that legendary figure of hope and revolt who challenged the Roman Republic, to the Emperor Augustus and his wife Livia, Rome’s new masters have grasped the reins by means of suspicious deaths and unsolved crimes. Noam looks on bewildered at the appearance of a limitless concentration of power.

Far away in Jerusalem, meanwhile, a man named Jesus is talking a very different language from the Romans. Preaching equality among men, he opens up a radically new horizon and offers infinite hope. Two “kingdoms” play out: one earthly and hegemonic, the other celestial and accessible to all. Between these two conceptions of the world, which kingdom will Noam choose?

In a swashbuckling novel that wears its learning lightly, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt takes on several fascinating civilisations and presents two visions of the human condition still in contest to this day albeit in a different guise.

About La Traversée des Temps (Crossing Time)

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt has set himself a mammoth task: to use fiction to tell the history of humanity, to teach history by telling stories. Yuval Noah Harari meets Alexandre Dumas!

Drawing on an extraordinarily wide range of disciplines – history, the sciences, religion, medicine and philosophy – this epic saga describes the journey of Noam, who discovers that he’s immortal, a characteristic that’s a curse and a gift in equal measure.

Each of the novels in this vast undertaking is pinned to a decisive age in human history and can be read independently of the others:

• Paradis perdus (Paradise Lost – the end of the Neolithic and the Flood)
• La Porte du ciel (Heaven’s Gate– Babel and Mesopotamian civilisation)
• Soleil sombre (The Sun Goes Down – Egypt under the Pharaohs and Moses)
• La Lumière du bonheur (The Light of Happiness – Greece in the fourth century BCE)