La Fee Verte by Samuel Clark

She is the nectar of the poet, the Green Muse. She steals the souls of those who love, turns their lives to despair and feeds her own. She is where love goes when it is destroyed and only hate shall remain. Her name is Green Fairy, and she lives in the absinthe. At the centre of several intertwined stories is Virginie Couvet, who falls in love with a man with ties to the church—a man who cannot afford to associate with her. Virginie and her sisters have invented a drink that their customers love but the church wants outlawed: Absinthe. Haunted by her lost love, and by strange visions of La Gargouille, Virginie desperately searches for release from her torment. Under the influence of a force she does not understand, the lines between this world and the next begin to blur. This gripping tale, pieced together from the translated diary extracts of those who have encountered La Fée Verte in her various forms, takes us on a journey that begins in sixth century France, but spans over a millennium.