Category Books
CLEAR THE DECKS for the fourth and final novel. After Treasure of Saint-Lazare, Last Stop: Paris, and Finding Pegasus, The Final Heist will draw a line under Eddie and Aurélie’s years-long search for the criminals who killed his wife, young… Continue Reading →
[cn-social-icon] The genocidal Bosnian war of the nineties has faded from Western consciousness. Not many people remember the brutal days when Sarajevo had to hang a curtain so snipers could not target civilian pedestrians, although anyone who was paying attention… Continue Reading →
[cn-social-icon] I came late to this amusing and informative book, I’m sorry to say. It’s an amazingly detailed compilation and exploration of what the French would call curiosités or choses insolites but it’s also a broad cultural overview. It’s an… Continue Reading →
A novel by Charles Cumming. St. Martin’s Press, Feb. 14, 2017. 356 pages. (Advance hardcover edition reviewed) Just a few months ago we thought the Cold War was long over, but now it seems to threaten us anew. Ever since John… Continue Reading →
A novel by Dominic Smith. Macmillan 2016. 304 pages. (Kindle edition reviewed) Dominic Smith has accomplished one of the most difficult tasks a novelist can take on — He has maintained the continuity of a story that flashes back and forth… Continue Reading →
Forty-plus years of living in Paris, first as a student then as the wife of a well-known banker and historian, have given Harriet Welty Rochefort the ability to look at both sides of the French-American cultural divide with a sharp… Continue Reading →
Thanks to the people at the Wishing Shelf Awards for awarding Last Stop: Paris its “Red Ribbon Award” and “highly recommended” rating. Wishing Shelf is a British organization that manages an annual contest for indie-published books. Its judgments are crowd-sourced — that is, the… Continue Reading →
TWO YEARS AGO, when I had hardly started the writing of Last Stop: Paris, I was casting about for a good location to set the climactic, resolving scene. I needed a crowded urban site (not hard to find in Paris)… Continue Reading →
When Patrick Modiano was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2014 he was virtually unknown outside France. He is a prolific author, with 30 books published in French, but very few had been translated into English. Yale University press… Continue Reading →
Opening Peter Steiner’s new novel The Capitalist was like visiting an old friend in his quaint cottage in the Loire — comfortable, relaxed (with a glass of good wine) and confident you’re about to hear a great story. I came… Continue Reading →