The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

The American author V. E. Schwab published the fantasy novel The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue through Tor Books on 6 October 2020. It stands alone rather than opening a series, and it was a finalist for the 2021 Locus Award in the best fantasy novel category. The book moves between two timelines, a present-day story in New York and a set of flashbacks that begin with Addie's childhood in France.

In 1714, a young French woman who is facing a forced marriage prays to the gods for her freedom and makes a bargain with the Dark. The deal makes her immortal, and the price, which she learns afterwards, is that everyone she meets forgets her the moment she is out of sight. Addie spends the next three hundred years being erased, learning to leave marks on a world that keeps smoothing them away and arguing with the power that holds her contract.

The book alternates between Addie's long history and the present, and the flashbacks carry her through the major events of the intervening centuries as an observer with no name that anyone remembers. Then, in a bookshop in New York, she meets somebody who remembers her name, which is the first time that has happened in three hundred years. The two of them have to work out what the exception means and who arranged it.

Schwab writes the novel as a standalone story about a deal, the two people on either side of it and how long a person can keep insisting that she exists. It is told in a nonlinear order, with the historical chapters and the present-day ones interleaved, and it is one of the books that made Schwab's adult fantasy work widely known.