The Moldovan Cousin

Sofia Andreeva arrived at the bookshop on a Thursday afternoon in late April, carrying a small suitcase, a canvas bag, and a single silver earring that had been in her family for three generations without anyone knowing what it matched.She was twenty-five years old. She had grown up in a village in Moldova. She had never heard of Saint-Aubin-sur-Loire, had never tasted Loire Valley wine, and had never spoken to a woman named Vivienne Marchetti. She arrived because a German man she had never met had arranged, from Munich, for her to come and because a sealed envelope in her bag contained, by his instructions, something she was not permitted to open until she was standing in a particular kitchen in a particular French village with a particular woman present.When the envelope was finally opened, what it contained changed everything again.The Moldovan Cousin is the fourth novel in K. Draven Smith’s acclaimed Loire Valley Series and the first to give equal weight to a new protagonist alongside Vivienne. It travels further than any previous book in the series, from a French bookshop kitchen to a village in Moldova to a reading of a will in Munich, following Sofia Andreeva as she begins to understand that the grandmother who raised her was carrying, all along, a piece of a story too large for any one family to hold alone.Victor Bauer dies in the middle of the book. His will, when it is read, reveals one final reframing not of what happened, but of what was intended. He has been, across the years since his first arrival in the village, preparing for a death he knew was coming and preparing for what he wanted to leave behind. What he leaves is not a thing. It is a direction.