The Martian: A Novel

Robert Maurice narrates the life of his schoolfriend Barty Josselin, beginning at a boys’ boarding school in Paris in the 1850s and following him into the army, out again, and into a slow failure of eyesight that brings him close to suicide. Relief arrives from an unlikely quarter: Martia, a female spirit from Mars who reaches him in sleep and guides the writing that makes him famous. She presses him toward Julia Royce; he marries Leah Gibson instead, and Martia comes to accept the choice, later returning as their child. Du Maurier died in October 1896, the month the first installment appeared in Harper’s, and the last ran the following July. The book reads more as reminiscence than plot, with long descriptive stretches and frequent digressions into remembered Paris.