Normally, that would be a pretty dumb bargain for any respectable devil, but he has another trick up his sleeve: she will be forgotten instantly by everyone she meets, condemning her to wander alone through history. Born in the small French village of Villon in 1691, Addie is an irrepressible dreamer who befriends an old woman named Estelle, who still worships the “old gods,” but warns Addie about “the gods that answer after dark.” It’s no surprise then that Addie, in her 20s and facing a drab life of marriage, motherhood, and death, makes a deal with just such a god, Luc, who grants her indefinite life – until such time as she decides to surrender her soul to him. The novel follows two timelines: one in 2014 New York, and one tracing Addie’s long life. I suspect there are two main answers: one is that Schwab focuses unrelentingly on the powerful passion of simply wanting to be seen, and the other is that her adoration for her main character, combined with her skill in pacing, is almost irresistibly contagious.

But before we get to that important detail, the main question about the novel isn’t its conceptual originality – it’s unabashedly a conglomerate – but how such a buffet of comfort foods can be as compelling as it is. There’s even a rom-com style meet-cute, when Addie, who has been getting away with thievery for 300 years, tries to return a book she stole a day earlier from the same bookshop, only to be recognized by Henry, the clerk she stole it from – and the first human to remember Addie in all those centuries. (I haven’t read Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s Nobody, but apparently forgettability is a sort of secret weapon there as well.) There are elements of the sentimental timeslip romance, stretched out over decades (or even centuries) that vaguely echo novels from Robert Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie to Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. Even the notion of someone cursed with being instantly forgettable has shown up a fair amount recently, such as in Claire North’s The Sudden Appearance of Hope and even in the YA superhero series Zeroes from Scott Westerfeld, Deborah Biancotti & Margo Lanagan, where it served as the superpower of the character Anonymous. The secret-immortal-living-among-us has been a genre staple for decades, occasionally given a more mainstream treatment, as in Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time. The deal-with-the-devil tale, of course, is as old as the devil.

Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie Larue that at times the novel feels like a gallery of old favorites curated by someone who clearly loves them all. There are so many classic themes woven together in V.E.

The invisible life of addie larue genre