A Debut Novel
The Apprentice of Cremona
A man wakes after twenty lost years — and remembers a life three centuries gone.
A man wakes after twenty lost years — and remembers a life three centuries gone.
For twenty years, Charles Barbier disappeared from the world.
He spent those twenty years in a bed at Bellevue Hospital — his eyes open, his body motionless, his voice silent. No one knew who he was, where he had come from, or what was happening behind those unseeing eyes.
Until one night, he woke up.
And his first words in twenty years were in Italian, spoken as though he were saying goodbye to a dear friend.
Charles claims to remember those twenty years. He just doesn't remember spending them in New York. He remembers eighteenth-century Cremona, working as an apprentice in the workshops of the great masters who built some of the most extraordinary violins in history.
Dr. Danielle Hatch knows that's impossible.
Charles knows she won't believe him.
But then he begins telling her things he shouldn't know. Places. People. Historical details. Secrets hidden for three centuries.
And he leaves behind a question that will take Danielle from a hospital room in New York to the streets of Cremona…
Did Charles Barbier really spend twenty years in the past — or is he an extraordinarily intelligent man constructing an extraordinarily perfect lie?
The evidence points both ways.
You decide.
— Charles Barbier —
Memories framed in smoke made of feelings,
Remembrances of events that almost didn't happen.
In a fraction of a second they passed,
yet the scenes remain imprinted
with scents, colors, and the beating of the heart.
For there is no present, only past and future.
I am nothing but my memories, living beings wandering free.
And with the endless flow of time,
new memories softly arrive and join
this eternal procession, filling the remaining empty spaces.
And more frames we gather where once the storms raged:
their faces, your laughter,
and the sweet solace of simply being.
Every moment is enough for me;
I need nothing else.
And though someday I might grow tired of keeping them,
in eternity, my frames, you, and I
will live in peace.
Rimembranze cinte da fumo d'affetti intessuto,
Memorie d'eventi ch'a stento ebber vita.
In un fuggente istante trapassaro,
Eppur l'impresse scene immote restaro,
Coi lor profumi, tinte, e 'l palpito del core.
Poiché non v'è presente, ma sol passato ed avvenir.
Non son ch'i miei ricordi, spirti vivi erranti in libertade.
E via via che fugge 'l tempo, più convitati s'uniscono
A quest'eterna processione, che colma ogni vòto spazio.
E vieppiù tele aduniam, ove pria fervea la procella:
I lor volti, i tuoi risi, e l'armonia del mero esistere.
M'è bastante ogn'istante, null'altro io desìo.
E seppur stanco di serbarli un dì mi ritrovi,
Nell'eternitade meco le mie tele, tu ed io vivrem in pace.
Part psychological mystery, part historical epic, The Apprentice of Cremona moves between a modern hospital room and the candlelit workshops of Italy's golden age of violin-making — asking how far a mind can travel, and whether memory can lie.
A story about craft, obsession, and the thin line between genius and delusion.
Read Chapter 1
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