The Illuminated Hours: A bittersweet Renaissance time travel romance

Every century, she falls in love. Every book, she comes home alone. Margaux Auvray restores what time breaks. In her Paris workshop, past midnight, she lifts a century of bad overpaint from a fire-scorched Book of Hours and finds a woman's face hidden in the margin. Her face. Then the smell of solvent becomes the smell of smoke, and the bench tips, and she is standing in the rue Saint-Jacques in 1552 with ink in the gutters and cherries in season. Nicolas Aubert prints prayer books by day and, for money and conviction, forbidden pages by night, in a street where they burn printers. He needs a gilder. Margaux needs a reason to be within arm's reach of the one book in Paris she cannot stop touching: the Book of Hours lying whole and unfinished on his desk, the same book that will lie burned on her bench five hundred years from now. She knows it survives. She knows something burns. She falls in love anyway, because the middle of the story is the only part that has ever belonged to her. A censor is circling. An apprentice is being bought. A margin is waiting, empty, for a face. And when the rules that carried her here start to close, Margaux and Nicolas will do what people of their trade have always done with the things they cannot keep: hide them, in gold, in the one place time cannot reach. The illuminated hours is a standalone novel in the Margaux, out of time collection: one traveler, many centuries, no reading order. A complete love story. A bittersweet ending. Bring tissues. For readers 18+.