Embrace the Surreal Journey

CAGED SOUL

A Novel

"On the eve of his career-defining Paris retrospective in 1957, a Spanish-born painter discovers that the woman who broke him twenty-one years ago has returned with a memoir dedicated to him—forcing him to confront whether the art that saved his life was built on a wound he never allowed to heal."

Literary Fiction | Dual Timeline: Paris 1957 / 1936 | 97,000 words

=== ABOUT THE NOVEL ===

Paris, November 1957. Antonio Ruiz, a forty-nine-year-old Spanish painter, is preparing his career-defining retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo when he discovers that Marie-Thérèse Laurent—the great love he lost twenty-one years ago—has resurfaced in the city with a memoir that may contain their shared past.

Interleaved with his present crisis, the novel reaches back to February 1936, when Antonio was a medical student at the Café de Flore, drawn into bohemian Paris through an electric encounter with Marie-Thérèse and a mentorship with the exacting painter Théodore Jacobovitz. As the timelines converge, Antonio must confront whether the art that saved him was built on a wound he has never allowed to heal—and whether seeing Marie-Thérèse again will complete his life's work or destroy it.

Caged Soul will appeal to readers of Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow. It is a novel about art, exile, memory, and the cost of becoming who you were meant to be.