One Who Disappeared now synopsized

Nick Gevers and I have concocted the flap copy for forthcoming One Who Disappeared, now posted on the PS website. It's cool to see everything coming together. I recently took another look back at the manuscript from 2007, and didn't feel the need to change a word of it (a rarity for me).

Hollywood, California, 1949. Exiled Czechoslovak composer Paul Haas lives a comfortable life at Universal Studios. He has a loving wife and family. His opera The Insect Play has been a hit at the Metropolitan in New York. But for Paul, the past is never far away; he’s haunted by memories of home, of too many friends and loved ones lost in the World War.

On a summer day, a telegram arrives, hinting at answers to mysteries sinister yet promising. It leads Paul into the heights of Brentwood Hills, and a startling revelation.

Driven by strange currents of destiny, Haas is compelled to leave his easy existence for one last journey into the past, to perform an act of devotion...

Prague, Czechoslovak Republic, 1929. Haas arrives in his beloved country at the zenith of her brief flourishing. Keeping to the shadows, Paul finds himself nonetheless drawn into the orbit of the urbane, witty Karel Capek and his insightful brother Josef, both in the prime of their artistic lives, unaware of the horror that lurks on the horizon.

After an encounter with a young flautist named Magdalena, who alone spies the truth of him, Paul seeks out a mysterious village in the hinterlands of Austria. It was there, six years earlier, that the eccentric Maestro J------ — Paul’s beloved mentor — snatched a melody from the air, disrupting the fabric of time. Now, in ruins far older than Christianity, Paul will be changed irrevocably, beginning an odyssey that leaps across the dwindling years toward a great conflagration, where artists of his Republic join with those of Europe and America to deliver an unexpected challenge to the coming chaos.

With On the Overgrown Path, The Luminous Depths, and now One Who Disappeared, David Herter has crafted a singular epic of time travel; a reverie on the World Wars from unique angles; an explication of a near-forgotten strand of Eastern European science fiction, music, and painting; and, most of all, a memorable evocation of real-life artists who, for a brief moment, changed the heartbeat of the world.