This best-selling debut novel from one of France’s most exciting young writers is based on the true story of the 1949 disappearance of Air France’s Lockheed Constellation and its famous passengersOn October 27, 1949, Air France’s new plane, the Constellation, launched by the extravagant Howard Hughes, welcomed thirty-eight passengers aboard. On October 28, no longer responding to air traffic controllers, the plane disappeared while trying to land on the island of S...

'A beautiful book about the best minds of a generation and the devastation of war - an outrageous voyage from the past that speaks eloquently to our present' Deborah LevyMarch 1941. A converted cargo ship, the Paul-Lemerle, left Marseille on a voyage to the Caribbean, fleeing Vichy France and the devastation of the war. The ship was filled with immigrants from the East, exiled Spanish Republicans, Jews, stateless persons and decadent artists. Among them we...

Thrust into the unlikely role of professional "literary walking tour" guide, an expat in Paris provides the most irresistibly witty and revealing tour of the city in years.In this enchanting Paris memoir, acclaimed author and long-time resident John Baxter remembers his yearlong experience of giving "literary walking tours" through the city. Baxter sets off with unsuspecting tourists in tow on the trail of Paris's legendary artists and writers of the past. This love letter to Frenc...

Paris is one city that you should endeavor to know over the course of a lifetime, and not just in one or two visits. It is the center of the civilized universe, and it belongs to everyone-even to those who see it only in their dreams. The City of Light has bestowed on millions the gift of the incandescent present, an image or experience into which all life is condensed and reflected upon for years to come. Travelers’ Tales Paris captures the romance of the world’s favorite city through sto...

Tragedy has found Cassiopeia Vitt. The woman she admires most, Esmerelda Fontana, has been brutally murdered. Then Cassiopeia’s castle rebuilding project is viciously attacked and people are hurt. Are the two incidents related? The answer comes when her old friend, Nicodème L’Etoile, is threatened and she finds herself drawn into a tangled web of revenge that leads straight to the person she loves the most.Cotton Malone.And his life will depend on what she does next.

A thriller of war that never was—of survival in an impossible city—of surreal cataclysm. In The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville entwines true historical events and people with his daring, uniquely imaginative brand of fiction, reconfiguring history and art into something new.“Beauty will be convulsive. . . .”In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer—and occult disciple—Jack Parsons stumbles onto a c...

The third volume of Richardson’s magisterial Life of Picasso, a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.Here is Picasso at the height of his powers in Rome and Naples, producing the sets and costumes with Cocteau for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and visiting Pompei where the antique statuary fuel his obsession with classicism; in Paris, creating some of his most important sculpture and paintin...

A startling debut novel about the burden of Holocaust memory and the implacable zest for life.Thirty-six years after her mother was liberated from Bergen-Belsen, the unnamed narrator lives a comfortable life in Paris. Her mother sees ghosts at every turn, longing to find the family that disappeared behind the miasma of the Holocaust, but she cannot reconcile her mother’s trauma to the cheery bustle of daily life that surrounds them. The pain of memories that are no...

In this brilliant book of recollection, one of America's finest writers re-creates people, places, and events spanning some fifty years, bringing to life an entire era through one man's sensibility. Scenes of love and desire, friendship, ambition, life in foreign cities and New York, are unforgettably rendered here in the unique style for which James Salter is widely admired.Burning the Days captures a singular life, beginning with a Manhattan boyhood and then, sat...

The renowned French author's modern masterpiece: "one of the great novels of the century . . . on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov" ( Boston Globe).Structured around a single moment in time—8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975—Georges Perec's "elaborate jigsaw puzzle of a novel" begins in an apartment block in Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, a rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, movin...

A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceNew York Times Notable author María Gainza, who dazzled critics with Optic Nerve, returns with the captivating story of an auction house employee on the trail of an enigmatic master forgerIn the Buenos Aires art world, a master forger has achieved legendary status. Rumored to be a woman, she specializes in canvases by the painter Mariette Lydis, a portraitist of Argentin...

The New York Times bestseller: the secrets of the City of Light, revealed in the lives of the great, the near-great, and the forgotten—by the author of the acclaimed The Discovery of France.This is the Paris you never knew. From the Revolution to the present, Graham Robb has distilled a series of astonishing true narratives, all stranger than fiction, of the lives of the great, the near-great, and the forgotten.A young artillery lieutenant, strolling throu...