I am absolutely delighted when an author catches me by surprise. With The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, V.E. Schwab has done more than that—she’s left me positively gobsmacked.

The bare bones of this novel are simple enough. A young woman name Addie LaRue, living in a small French village in 1714, yearns to escape the constricted life she’s meant to live, a life delineated by the borders of her village, and makes a bargain with a dark entity—she can live forever, but will be immediately forgotten by every person she meets. Pause for a moment, and think about the ramifications of that.

What follows is a tour de force that spans centuries, across war-torn Europe and Prohibition America, through revolutions both military and cultural. Addie doesn’t just have a front row seat, she’s in the thick of it, whether starving on the docks of Paris, helping the French resistance, drinking in a Chicago speakeasy, or making her way through present day New York.

If this makes The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue seem like a literary version of Forrest Gump, then I’m doing a poor job of explaining it. This is a meditation on life itself, on what makes a life well lived, and a life worth living. Schwab has important things to say about the nature of art, and most all, about the nature of love. Because above all, this novel is a ravishing love story, or, depending on your point of view, two ravishing love stories. Some readers may say a love triangle, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Schwab examines love from every angle—as an overwhelming force, as comfort, as a game, as conflict, as strategy, as a desperate cry for help, and even as a masquerade for hate. Schwab has interesting things to say about vengeance, as well.

Schwab’s language throughout the novel is incandescent. She writes with artful assurance, spinning glorious webs of story at will. There are three different chapters in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (no, I won’t tell you which ones) that I immediately went back and read through again, both because of the breathtaking language Schwab employs, and because I wanted to figure out just how she pulls off her magic.

With Addie, Schwab has created one of the most utterly original characters in modern fiction. She is a creature of fierce will and determination, and if her story is often heartbreaking, it is just as often triumphant.

Although I know Schwab by reputation, I had only read one of her novels previously to this one, This Savage Song, which I absolutely loved, by the way. I blame the extraordinary number of books in the world for the fact that I haven’t yet read A Darker Shade of Magic or any of her other celebrated novels. I’m a little embarrassed that I’ve let an author of this rare talent escape me, but I plan on fixing that. It may only be early February, but my guess is, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue will end up being one of my favorite reads of the year.