Finding this book in my smallish public library, I read it with some fascination over a few days, and with the surprise one feels on hearing a genuine voice. Laurus is the fourth name by which the protagonist is known in the book, the final stage of his transfiguration. For most of the book he is known as Arseny, a healer and a holy man, trained by his grandfather in the use of plants. Examination of holiness and divinity is one layer of the book; but this is not religion that seeks to convert, that preaches or convinces. This is divinity as the mechanism that moves the world, and for Arseny it is bedrock. He sits inside his beliefs with such comfort and certainty that the idea of church explains miracles, transformations, angelic incarnations, to such a degree that Vodolazkin can basically take the book in any direction he likes. Another layer of the work is the formulation of eternity as Arseny’s true habitation and the fiction of time the dream through which he moves. There are impossible, sometimes clumsy, moments in the novel; set in the fifteenth century, it transfers itself in an instant into any other moment it chooses. This is not a time travel novel; the author’s design is that all instants are adjacent to one another. A storm in a medieval forest uncovers plastic bottles under the leaves. A twentieth century Italian Catholic undertakes a journey with Arseny through Medieval Europe to the Holy Land. Paragraphs move the story into other such territories, we glimpse a moment in time, and then move back into the narrative of Arseny and his long expiation for sin. Time moves or time circles or time dodges or time does not exist at all. Yet the book is very literal and not at all speculative. And in Arseny (and later Ambrosio) we meet characters whose focus on God enables them to see through the veil of the ordinary into the future, the past, even into the fates of those around them. All this feels quite effortless and tangible. Even the prose shifts tense as it pleases. Form follows function. A read to remember.