Two Thousand Years to Ask: A Novel

Four failed relationships in three years. He is about to find out why.Nicolas Brandt is thirty-six, makes an obscene amount of money, and has just had a door slammed in his face for the fourth time in three years. Every one of those women was remarkable. Every one of them left.Then a red-haired woman gets into his elevator and he is too frightened to say hello - and turns up two weeks later as Anna, on exchange from the Warsaw office.At a magic show in a basement, a hypnotist asks for two volunteers. They go under four feet apart.And they wake holding hands, in tears, having both spent an hour in Pompeii in the summer of A.D. 79 - where he was a centurion who bought her at auction, where his wife was the most loyal person he would ever meet, and where the mountain was already opening.What he finds there is not that they were lovers.It is why he has never once asked anybody what they wanted.