The Song of Antoine

In Napoleon's Bees, the sequel to The Song of Antoine, the story of the brothers Antoine and Sebastién continues five years after the brutal end of the French Revolution. It is the fall of 1799. Napoleon is First Consul, and France is a very different world from the one in which the brothers grew up. Through these times of change, Antoine's and Sebastien's fates continue on divergent paths, however their deep emotional wounds remain unresolved, and festering. And, in a France where it has become expedient to discard the very idea of the Revolution, their mother, who is now one of the luminaries of Parisian high-society, raises impenetrable walls of lies and deceit between them to conceal deadly secrets that, if revealed, threaten to destroy them all. They are the secrets of the violin Antoine had played at the foot of the guillotine on the fateful day his father and sister were executed.But one person knows all the secrets and the treachery behind them-the famous Parisian virtuoso violinist and the violin's self-appointed guardian, Guntrid von Elbert. The violin kills, Guntrid warns. It kills for Antoine, and only he can remove its curse.But Antoine is dead, is he not?