Description: Room XIX of the Museum of Albion doesn't usually have many visitors. But when a huge crowd of dispossessed immigrants and homeless gather to see a mummy that has recently been moved, political pressure mounts, and the curator must reveal the mystery behind the locked door. To the passionate young man who has adopted the once secret mummy as a figurehead, the curator explains that it is actually a bundle of intriguing documents about an unknown woman named Leto. Marina Warner's magical new novel weaves together the legend of this ancient goddess with the drama of the curator, her new friend, and all the others whose lives will be transformed by the Leto Bundle.

As Leto moves westward across the map from her first home, she slips through time, reappearing in different guises and ever on the run: she gives birth to twins during a far-off era of civil strife, shelters with wolves, stows away on a ship, works as a chambermaid in a war-torn city, and, in a bombing attack, saves her daughter but loses her son. The novel sweeps from prehistory to the Middle Ages, to Victorian Europe, and then to the present day, when Leto reappears, still searching for her long-lost son.

In The Leto Bundle, the eternal story of the refugee becomes a powerful modern novel of huge scope and imaginative force.

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