The Magician's Assistant

by Ann Patchett

What is to become of a magician's assistant without her magician? This is the question Sabine asks herself after the death of Parsifal, the magician she worked with for more than twenty years and her husband for only a few months. Parsifal loved men, especially Phan, and though Sabine loved Parsifal, she contented herself with his friendship. Now Parsifal and Phan are both gone, and Sabine is left with full responsibility for their possessions and their histories. Always the assistant, her life is still defined by service to Parsifal. But in the world of illusion Sabine has occupied for her entire life, things are rarely what they seem. According to Parsifal, he had no living relatives. Now, with his death, comes the news that he has a mother and two sisters living in Alliance, Nebraska. Inevitably, the strangers will meet and Sabine will be carried away from her beloved Los Angeles to seek the truth of Parsifal's past in the bitterly windswept steppes of Nebraska in winter. It is her…