Leonardo’s Handwriting is a romantic morality tale with an unconventional woman at its heart. Nature has given the heroine, Anna, the gift of clairvoyance, and it is this gift that shapes her singular fate. Her distinctive left-handed mirror writing, known in psychology as “Leonardo’s handwriting” because the Renaissance genius wrote his notes that way, only adds to the strangeness of both Anna’s personality and the novel’s twists and turns. Is the divine gift of prophecy a blessing or a curse? And how can anyone bear the weight of so astonishing a gift?
This is also a novel about love: strong, noble and tragic, a love that, in short, “is stretched to breaking point”. Beyond the classic love triangle, there is another character whose strange, platonic longing for Anna resembles a call from the “mirror universe” that has enchanted and drawn her since childhood. The reader must piece together this mirror puzzle of personalities and events, as the storyline slowly comes into focus, bit by bit, like an image in a misted mirror. The full picture emerges only in the very last paragraph.
Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia
