Paris Stars

Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.

Crime Fiction

• Murder in the Sentier
  Author: Black, Cara
  Publisher: Soho $ 24 ISBN: 1569472785 Date: 2002
  PW
  The third Aimee Leduc investigation is set in the historic Sentier district, where once-fashionable private mansions now house the Parisian "rag" trade and nightclubs. Members of a 1960s Red gang are seeking their hidden loot, which leads to new murders. Aimee fears the killers may include her long-lost mother.
  Updated 3/7/02
• Murder in the Bastille
  Author: Black, Cara
  Publisher: Soho Press $ 23.00 ISBN: 1569473242 Date: 2003
  Kirkus
  April in Paris is a time for crime when Aime Leduc is attacked in an alley and knocked unconscious. When she awakes, she discovers she is blind. The police maintain she was the victim of a serial killer targeting showy blondes. Was he after another woman, or was Aime his intended victim?
  Updated 1.26.03
• A Citizen of the Country
  Author: Smith, Sarah
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 24.95 ISBN: 0345433025 Date: 2000
  Kirkus
  In the ancient, bloody region of French Flanders looms Montfort castle, home of Count Andre du Monde, owner of a famous Parisian horror theater. To repair his fortunes, he marries an heiress. Then the Grand Necropolitan Theater is suddenly stricken with disasters.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Mystery Stars
  Updated 6/6/00

Fiction

• Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper
  Author: Chessman, Harriet Scott
  Publisher: Seven Stories $ 24 ISBN: 15832222723 Date: 2001
  Kirkus
  Set in the Parisian art world of the 1880s, this novel imagines a poignant time in the lives of the American impressionist Mary Cassatt and her sister, Lydia. Fatally ill and conscious of impending death, Lydia contemplates her narrowing world.
  Suggested Reading: Art Stars
  Updated 10/8/01
• Light at Dusk
  Author: Gadol, Peter
  Publisher: Picador $ 24 ISBN: 0312203365 Date: 2000
  PW
  In this atmospheric new novel by the author of The Long Rain, three Americans launch a desperate search across Paris for a kidnapped boy. In the process, they must challenge the moral burdens of their past, and in an attempt to rescue the child, find a way to redeem themselves.
  
• Le Divorce
  Johnson, Diane
  E P Dutton List Price: 23.95 ISBN: 0525942386 Date: 1997
  Publishers Weekly
  Combining delicious wit with penetrating social vision, Diane Johnson, author of The Shadow Knows, returns with a modern comedy of manners featuring two American sisters who take on sophisticated French society.
  
• Le Mariage
  Author: Johnson, Diane
  Publisher: Dutton $ 23.95 ISBN: 0525945180 Date: 2000
  PWLibrary Journal
  In her sparkling, new comedy of manners, the bestselling author of Le Divorce puts a contemporary twist on this venerable form with her keen-eye portraits of modern-day Americans living in Paris.
  Updated 3/13/00.

Nonfiction

• The Piano Shop on the Left Bank
  by Carhart, Thad
  Publisher: Random $ 23.95 ISBN: 0375503048 Date: 2001
  Kirkus
  This intimate and idiosyncratic history of the piano and a view into the secret heart of Paris life is written by an American expatriate, who details his attempts to gain entry into a piano shop where locals gathered to discuss music, love, and life.
  
• A Year in the Merde
  Author: Clarke, Stephen
  Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 22.95 ISBN: 1582345910 Date: 2005
  LJ
  A #1 bestseller in the United Kingdom and an urban antidote to A Year in Provence, this laugh-out-loud account of a year in the life of an expat in Paris is the almost-true story of the author's own experiences.
  Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
  Updated 4.7.05 >
• From Paris to the Moon
  by Gopnik, Adam
  Publisher: Random House $ 23.95 ISBN: 0679444920 Date: 2000
  Booklist
  The comic-romantic adventures of an American family in Paris is penned by "The New Yorker" writer and author of the magazine's popular "Paris Journal" column. The private story is rooted in the sentimental re-education of a weary American through the experience of his son's childhood in France.
  Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
• Paris: A Thousand Year History
  Author: Jones, Colin
  Publisher: Viking $ 29.95 ISBN: 0670033936 Date: 2005
  PW
  A British historian unfolds the entire history of Paris in a single splendid volume that is simultaneously exuberant and erudite. Fluent in cultural as well as political history, Jones brings to life the people, ideas, social movements, and architectural upheavals that have made and remade Paris.
  Updated 3.10.05
• Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
  Author: Macmillan, Margaret Olwen
  Publisher: Random $ 35 ISBN: 0375508260 Date: 2002
  PWLJBooklist
  In this landmark work of narrative history, MacMillan brings extraordinary personalities to life. The great-granddaughter of Lloyd George, she makes use of his personal papers and gives a scintillating view of those dramatic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, when countries--Iraq, Yugoslavia, Israel--were founded whose troubles haunt the world still.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 8.28.02
• Report From a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939
  Author: Roth, Joseph
  Publisher: Norton $ 24.95 ISBN: 0393051455 Date: 2003
  KirkusPW
  Joseph Roth (1894-1939), the greatest European newspaper correspondent of his age, left the splintering Weimar Republic for Paris in 1925. Translated and collected together here for the first time in English, the exhilarating pieces in this evocative collection distill the wisdom of a lost generation.
  Updated 11.17.03
• Me Talk Pretty One Day
  by Sedaris, David
  Publisher: Little Brown $ 22.95 ISBN: 0316777722 Date: 2000
  Kirkus
  Sedaris's essays on living in Paris are some of the funniest he's ever written. At last, someone even meaner than the French! - Publisher marketing.
• The Twilight Years: Paris in the 1930's
  by Wiser, William
  Publisher: Carroll & Graff $ 26 ISBN: 0786707860 Date: 2000
  Kirkus
  This lavishly illustrated social history of Paris as it went through the 1930s looks at the how throughout that decade the city continued to revel in Montparnasse and Montmartre, retained its allure as a magnet city to celebrated expatriates, and how the fall of Paris came with Nazi occupation in 1940.