Thomas Pichon seems forever at a crossroads, often choosing the path of least resistance, or the most tempting. In this, the third Thomas Pichon novel, his life remains more complicated than he wishes. He encounters highwaymen on a country road, succumbs to a tempting tryst in the spa town of Bath, squanders a new love in London and longs for the higher social station he once enjoyed. Returning to Paris, Thomas’s work life initially stalls, but a new lover offers help. He is given the best position he has ever had, one that requires him to go overseas. The crossing is a voyage neither he nor anyone aboard will soon forget.

A.J.B. Johnston has published more than a dozen books and hundreds of articles, a thirty-plus years career studying and writing about 18th-century French colonial history in Acadia. In recognition of his prolific career as a historian and writer, John was invested by France with the title Chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques (Order of Academic Palms). Johnston has now turned his hand to fiction. Long inspired to know more about Thomas Pichon (1700-1781), In his first novel, Thomas, A Secret Life (CBU Press, 2012), Johnston applied his considerable sense of 18th-century French history to imagine young Pichon’s early life in Normandy and Paris. For The Maze, Johnston did extensive research on 18th-century London.

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