An Astronomer in Love

by Antoine Laurain, Louise Rogers Lalaurie (Translator), Megan Jones (Translator)

Overview

Part seafaring historical adventure and part modern-day love story, an enchanting tale of destiny and the power of love from bestselling French novelist Antoine Laurain.

“Perfect for the poolside or sitting outside a café with a pastis and olives—and bound to give you just the same cheering lift.”  — The Times

In 1760, Guillaume le Gentil, astronomer to King Louis XV, sets sail for India. He hopes to record the transit of Venus, but rough seas—and war with the British—make his quest more complicated than he could have imagined. In the end he will live through 11 years of adventures and misadventures, travelling from France to India, India to the Philippines, enduring illness, shipwreck, and the loss of more than he could have imagined, before he returns home.

250 years later, anxious, lonely Xavier Lemercier chances upon Guillaume's telescope in a flea market. As he looks out across the rooftops of Paris, he glimpses an intriguing woman with a zebra in her apartment. Then she walks into his office, and his life changes forever.

Xavier, a divorced single father struggling to keep his business afloat, will find meaning in pursuing the same quest as Guillaume did centuries earlier—the key to his heart lies in the transit of Venus (who, after all, was a love goddess). Part swashbuckling adventure on the high seas and part modern-day love story set in the heart of Paris, this is a time-travelling tale of adventure, destiny and the power of love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781805333623
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	02/03/2026
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256

About the Author

Antoine Laurain was born in Paris and is a journalist, antiques collector and award-winning author of ten novels, including The Red Notebook and The President's Hat. His books have been translated into 25 languages and sold more than 200,000 copies in English. He lives in Paris, France.

Louise Rogers Lalaurie is a writer and translator from the French. She is based in France and the UK.

Megan Jones is a translator. She lives in London.

Read an Excerpt

On the twenty-sixth of March 1760, Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de La Galaisière, astronomer to the Académie Royale des Sciences, boarded the fifty-gun ship Le Berryer in the French port of Lorient, bound for India. As the naval vessel put to sea, he just about managed to cling to the mast – his silver-buckled, patent-leather shoes had almost caused him to lose his footing on the slippery deck. A stiff Breton gale whipped his blue frock coat and lace jabot, and he pressed his right hand firmly to the crown of his three-cornered black felt hat. The start of a long and perilous voyage. When a man set sail to journey halfway around the globe, there was no knowing, in those days, whether he would be seen alive again. Guillaume Le Gentil was travelling on the orders of His Majesty Louis XV, charged with a precise mission – for which he was most uniquely qualified – to measure, with the aid of his telescopes and astronomical instruments, the true (rather than the supposed) distance from the Earth to the sun, on the occasion of the transit of Venus across our star.

The small planet named for the Goddess of Love took an unusual sequence of turns across the sun’s disc, to say the least: one passage was followed by a second 8 years later, after which a whole 122 years would pass before the next. Then another 8 year interval, but after that, it would be 105 years until another transit could be observed. The alternating sequence of 8, 122 and 105 years was unchanged since the creation of the universe itself.

Guillaume Le Gentil had taken every care not to miss the exceptional observations he would make from Pondicherry on 6 June 1761, more than a year after his departure from France. Thanks to which he might, perhaps, become the first man to measure the true distance between the Earth and the star that is the source of all its light.

Everything was prepared down to the last detail, and yet nothing whatsoever would go as planned.

Breathe.

You are alive. Everything is fine.

You are sitting down. Feel the weight of your body, the weight of your feet and your hands.
Take note of the sounds that surround you.

The familiar female voice was reassuring. It was the same for every session. Xavier Lemercier was on his fifteenth daily session of so-called ‘mindful’ meditation. This scientific practice had been one of his discoveries when he’d tried to quit smoking. Until now, Xavier had never got into meditation, and as a matter of principle he was hesitant about this sort of thing, imagining it to be full of obscure phrases, with echoes of the New Age and cheap shamanism. ‘Imagine you are a fox. Feel the flower within you.’ ‘Turn your heart towards the eternal Planet Gaia, nurturing mother of all living things.’ But that wasn’t the case with the app he had downloaded, the only goal of which was to establish thirty-minute pauses each day, and to quieten the frenetic buzz of thoughts that intruded upon every moment like so many wasps. Now the habit of returning to the voice and its soothing phrases was almost as pleasant as pouring oneself a cold aperitif on a sunny terrace after a day’s work. For thirty minutes a day, Xavier almost managed to forget his worries, which, for him, was no small feat.

Now, when you feel ready, leave your thoughts behind and let’s begin the body scan.

The body scan consisted of mentally sweeping the body, from the tip of your toes to the top of your head, locating any points of discomfort. Xavier often noted a pain in his lower back and a tightness in his stomach.

He had been anxious for two long months. His estate agency was stagnating. Sales were inexplicably few and far between. Admittedly, the Parisian market was over-inflated; prices weren’t going down, but by 2012 fewer people were interested in buying and selling property. The usual indicators – household consumption, buying power, the stock market – hardly accounted for the weak sales. But the ‘market stakeholders’, according to their sacred slogan, all gave the same report: not much was going on at the moment. The most robust among them were unfazed, or seemed to be, but the more fragile ones were beginning to ask themselves questions. The Lemercier and Bricard agency had been well established for twenty years now. Xavier had started out in the Parisian real-estate market with a friend from business school. Now forty-seven years old, Xavier was left as the sole head of Lemercier and Bricard. When someone asked for ‘Monsieur Bricard’, Xavier replied, calmly, that he was on a business trip. An agency with two names lent it a more reputable air, suggesting a solid team and numerous colleagues at the ready.

Bruno Bricard, his partner who was ‘on a business trip’, had suddenly decided to return to the countryside two years ago. Tired of city life, tired of all the commuting and the pollution, he told his friend that he wanted to sell his shares. Along with his wife and two children, he had overhauled his life by buying, for the price of their Parisian apartment, a seventeenth-century mansion with eighteen hectares of land in the Dordogne, which they planned to turn into a bed and breakfast. During his last months at the agency, Bruno had tried over and over again to convince Xavier to do the same, with persuasive drawings, surveys and projections detailing how cities would soon become saturated with fine particulate matter and pollution, invaded by cars that reproduced like rabbits. Bruno was certainly right, at least in part, but Xavier couldn’t see himself living in the countryside. Also, Bruno had his family with him, which was no longer the case for Xavier. Since his difficult divorce from Céline, there had been no other women, and he had joint custody of his eleven-year-old son, Olivier. When he presented this argument to his colleague, Bruno could only agree, chastened. ‘Yes, you’re right. It’s more complicated for you,’ he had admitted.

It seemed to Xavier that his life had gone off track at some point, and he had trouble pinpointing that particular moment. Often, he felt like a bachelor with no future, selling apartments to other people who were full of energy and ambition, so that they could build their lives there. These were the kind of plans that no longer seemed within his reach.

Nothing is really that complicated.

The things you perceive as difficult are most often just mental blocks.

You’re adding layers of unnecessary and unproductive anxiety.

Set them aside.

Nothing is especially complicated on board a ship, except when the vessel climbs up, then plummets down waves the height of a tall building, when seasickness strikes, and when a man suffers from claustrophobia. The captain of the Berryer, Louis de Vauquois, had been instructed by the Duc de La Vrillière to take great care of his astronomer. Guillaume Le Gentil wore a greenish pallor and a fixed stare whenever they ran into a storm. He said his prayers more often than the crew, but on a calm sea, on a sunny day, he was a delightful travelling companion indeed. The astronomer proved most useful, too: his precisely calibrated instruments provided the captain with measurements and information unmarked on his maps. Le Gentil plotted their course by observing the stars and the moon. On occasion, he succeeded in correcting the Berryer’s distance from land by several nautical miles. The great copper-and- brass telescope that he used for his observations, bright as gold on its tripod, had attracted Vauquois’s admiration. Guillaume Le Gentil had invited him to put his eye to the small glass when the instrument was pointed at the full moon. What Vauquois saw took his breath away: the Earth’s satellite loomed so large that its craters could be seen as clearly as the Saint-Malo lighthouse on his ship’s return to port. On another occasion, the captain pointed out a streak of light in the sky that had been following them, to all appearances, for the past half-hour or more. Straightaway, Le Gentil fetched another telescope, shorter and thicker in diameter, standing on a single foot. The object was a comet, and squinting into his lens, the astronomer could just about make out its tail. For the next eight days, he busied himself with quill pen and compasses, darkening the pages of several notebooks in an attempt to calculate the comet’s speed. The challenge filled him with delight, and as they approached the Cape of Good Hope, in fine weather, he forgot his fears of life afloat, even his seasickness. He took luncheon and dinner in the captain’s quarters, feasting on succulent grilled fish unlike any in France. One morning, the Berryer’s nets even brought in a squid the size of a horse, with tentacles as long as the ship itself from prow to poop. The crew chopped it to pieces with their axes and the cook emptied an entire barrel of wine into several cast-iron cauldrons, so as to stew it in a heady court-bouillon of his own invention. That same evening, the entire company savoured the giant cephalopod’s tender, salty flesh. The unexpected catch prompted tales of the terrifying sea creatures so often depicted in engravings, though it was never clear whether these were the fruit of man’s imagination or a record of genuine sightings. According to the mariners, the strong currents and headwinds off the Cape of Good Hope sometimes gave a rare glimpse of the dreaded Caracac. The captain had never seen it, but he knew its description from the accounts of others. From his bookshelves, he produced a vast tome that must have taken the hides of a couple of fat sows for its binding, and opened it on a well-thumbed page. Guillaume Le Gentil bent over the book to discover a woodcut of a monster that resembled a scorpion fish as big as the Berryer. The creature’s gaping jaws were easily five times the size of the great iron gates of Versailles, and from the top of its head a jet of water shot up like a fountain. The astronomer felt an icy shiver down his spine. If ever he crossed the monster’s path, said Vauquois, in conclusion, he prayed God would come to his aid. Then he crossed himself and slammed the volume shut.


A few days later, Le Gentil stepped up to the bridge as the ship began its course around the southernmost tip of Africa. Standing close by the rail, he saw a great mass emerge from the waves, muscular, grey and gleaming, its skin tanned by the salt of the deep. A spout of water and air burst forth, rising to a height of fifty feet or more. Guillaume’s heart stopped: the woodcut was made flesh. The Caracac was preparing to dive, and it would take the entire ship down with it.

He had never seen a whale, not even in a book, and now they surrounded the ship in great numbers, their blowholes spouting both to port and starboard, to the delight of the mariners who broke into hearty, rousing song. Reassured, Guillaume Le Gentil took a pair of steel-framed spectacles from his waistcoat pocket. They had been made to order by Margissier, who crafted all the lenses for his telescopes. The spectacles comprised two circles of ink-black glass, through which he could observe the sun with no risk to his eyes. He thought of Hortense, the wife he had left behind in Paris, who would have to wait for him for almost a year and a half. He pictured her in the silence of their lodgings, her slender fingers embroidering a delicate motif on a tablecloth, while his ship plied the waves with its escort of sperm whales. He was smiling at the thought of all he would tell her on his return, when a sudden gust of wind snatched the three-cornered black felt hat from his head. It came to land on the back of a nearby whale, from where, just as suddenly, it shot high into the air atop a powerful jet of water.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for An Astronomer in Love

Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2024 

Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Viking Award for Fiction 2024

'Cinematic and enchanting' Foreword Reviews (starred)

‘Perfect for the poolside or sitting outside a café with a pastis and olives – and bound to give you just the same cheering lift’ The Times

‘A brilliant love story . . . The supporting cast, including a not-quite-dead dodo and a zebra, will have readers laughing and crying in equal measure’ The Lady

'Simply beautiful. An enchanting dual-timeline story of a love written in the stars' Fiona Valpy, author of The Dressmaker’s Gift

‘A perfect treasure waiting to be discovered by adventurous readers. An Astronomer in Love is a witty, lovely, surprising triumph’ William Ryan, author of A House of Ghosts

Praise for Antoine Laurain

'Parisian perfection’ HM The Queen Consort 

‘The very quintessence of French romance’ The Times 

‘A hymn to la vie Parisienne’  The Guardian

‘Like finding a gem among the bric-a-brac in a local brocante’ The Telegraph 

‘A master storyteller’ Huffington Post 

‘Soaked in Parisian atmosphere . . . will have you rushing to the Eurostar post-haste’ Daily Mail 

‘J’adore Antoine and his contemporary French comedies’ Wendy Holden 

‘Like fine wine, Laurain’s novels get better with each one he writes’ Phaedra Patrick, author of The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper

'The Parisian tableaus are so descriptive that you can almost smell the croissants' Washington Post

'Witty and perceptive' Publishers Weekly

'The novels of Antoine Laurain [are] straightforward and ingenious' New York Journal of Books

From the Publisher