This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

When Nadia dies in a road accident in Amsterdam, her husband Marc — a Danish structural engineer — finds a card in her packed bag: the cream-coloured card of Le Cinquième Séjour, the Jura retreat where they spent nine transformative days together, and where something the building had always known was coming began.

Marc returns to the séjour, and Deva, its enigmatic custodian, has gathered others: Kenji and Sylvie, a Japanese-British couple whose eight-year-old son Haru died six weeks ago; Isobel and Thomas from Scotland, who bought the coastal house they dreamed of just in time for their daughter Clara to die; Solène, a French-Californian marine biologist whose husband Daniel was killed cycling four months ago; and three other couples, each carrying a sudden and specific loss.

What none of them know yet is that the dead are already in the building.

Based on the Tibetan Buddhist teachings of the bardo — the intermediate state between death and rebirth — the novel alternates between the living on the fifth floor and the dead in their wandering ghost-like existence, unable to reach the people they love until the séjour's fifth floor thins the barrier between worlds in sleep. Night by night, in the translated space of dream, the living and the dead say what needs to be said: the unfinished essay, the one true thing, the love stated as structural fact.

The Fifth Floor: Bardo is a novel about grief and the nature of love after the body ends. It is about the light source that is always just outside the frame. It asks what we carry forward, and what carries us.

Fifth Floor, The

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