Journal Entry 1 by AnonymousFinder on Monday, December 06, 2004

"The story begins in 1429 on Madeira, an island consumed by a fire that has blazes for seven years. A peasant girl of fifteen meets a boy - a Jewish outsider - off a Portuguese sailing ship. Esperanca thirsts for knowledge; Emmanuel opens her mind to other worlds. They know they must part when the ship sails. From that first meeting and parting, others follow...
Portugal with its golden light, lemon groves and wild flowers, is the setting for celebrations, passion, catastrophe: an earthquake brings Lisbon crashing to ruins...fleeing persecution, an entire people faces expulsion from the land. Emmanuel is in turn sailor, mapmaker, bookseller, jazz musician. Esperanca the illiterate peasant is a frivolous girl in Faro's privileged class, a clever, bookish recluse who confronts a murderer on the great aqueduct in nineteenth-century Lisbon...
Still searching, she surfaces in twentieth-century London, faced with a double incarnation: one the true Emmanuel, the other a shadow. Over the centuries the couple face peril, tenderness, horror. Each life is short. What survives is love." 

Journal Entry 2 by time-traveler from Westchester, New York USA on Monday, March 07, 2005

I am so happy to get this book!!!!!!! Thank you so much for the trade...I don't know why I love this book so much. I am the only person I know who has read it! It is beautifully and intelligently written; I guess that's partly the reason. I'm fascinated by the concept of two star-crossed lovers who don't quite recognize each other but keep meeting up again and again throughout the centuries.

This is one book that I will read again and again.