The Girl from Tower 330

A boy and a girl in an elevator rocketing up to the 115th floor of a tower school. In those few short minutes, the boy falls in love. It turns out that Celeste is the newcomer—and she will study in his class! Celeste bursts into his life, into his thoughts in a flash—so fast, in fact, that she vanishes just as quickly. At school he never sees her again.

In the future world, people live, study, work, and get treated inside enormous glass towers—beyond their walls, there’s no place for anything or anyone, not even for nature. Cars stand vertically in separate parking towers; adults have to work to exhaustion to feed themselves and their children; as for what threatens the planet from endless exploitation, business corporations and those in power prefer to stay silent.

For a 14-year-old boy telling the story of his love, there was nothing in his life besides his best friend Brice and a world map he drew right on the floor and the apartment walls. But now there’s another thing: the idea of finding Celeste, because her mysterious disappearance can’t be accidental. For these searches, the hero is ready for anything—even climbing to the top of the 330th tower, which is shrouded in the thickest smoke.

Timothée de Fombelle’s fantastic tale “The Girl from 330” reads like a gripping novel and touches like an intimate poem. It’s no coincidence that this author’s books have become classics of French literature. They are included in the French school curriculum and sell in record numbers in dozens of languages. In Russian, the author’s works also include the writer’s diptychs “Toby Lolness” and “Vango,” as well as the adventure novel “The Book of Joshua Pearl.”