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Paris Was The Place

Author Susan CONLEY

on Tour

October 28 – November 6

with her novel:

Paris Was The Place

[literary fiction/family life]

 Release date: August 7, 2013
from Knopf/Random House

    354 pages

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SYNOPSIS

With her new novel, Paris Was the Place (Knopf, 2013), Susan Conley offers a beautiful meditation on how much it matters to belong: to a family, to a country, to any one place, and how this belonging can mean the difference in our survival. Novelist Richard Russo calls Paris Was the Place, “by turns achingly beautiful and brutally unjust, as vividly rendered as its characters, whose joys and struggles we embrace as our own.”

When Willie Pears begins teaching at a center for immigrant girls in Paris all hoping for French asylum, the lines between teaching and mothering quickly begin to blur. Willie has fled to Paris to create a new family, and she soon falls for Macon, a passionate French lawyer. Gita, a young girl at the detention center, becomes determined to escape her circumstances, no matter the cost. And just as Willie is faced with a decision that could have dire consequences for Macon and the future of the center, her brother is taken with a serious, as-yet-unnamed illness. The writer Ayelet Waldman calls Paris Was the Place “a gorgeous love story and a wise, intimate journal of dislocation that examines how far we’ll go for the people we love most.” Named on the Indie Next List for August 2013 and on the Slate Summer Reading List, this is a story that reaffirms the ties that bind us to one another.   [provided by the publisher]

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SELECT ADVANCE PRAISE
[AS FEATURED ON THE AUTHOR’S WEBSITE]

Susan Conley’s Paris Was the Place has the kind of emotional weight you hope for in a novel. Its world, by turns achingly beautiful and brutally unjust, is as vividly rendered as its characters, whose joys and struggles we embrace as our own.  ­— Richard Russo, author of Elsewhere and Empire Falls

Sensual and seductive, Paris Was the Place pulls you in and doesn’t let you go. Find your nearest chair and start reading. With her poet’s eye, Conley has woven a vivid, masterful tale of love and its costs.  ­— Lily King, author of Father of the Rain

Paris Was the Place renders viscerally just how the personal becomes the political, and vice-versa: it’s beautifully eloquent on the shortfall we so keenly feel between the comfort and support we can offer loved ones and the comprehensive safety we wish we could provide. It reminds us through the openheartedness of its compassion of the infinity of ways in which doing what we can for others might represent the best we can do in terms of saving ourselves.  — Jim Shepard, author of You Think That’s Bad

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VIRTUAL BOOK TOUR SCHEDULE

Monday, Oct 28
Review  at Chocolate & Croissants

Tuesday, Oct 29
Review  at From L.A. To LA

Wednesday, Oct 30
Review  at Mommasez…

Thursday, Oct 31
Review at Words And Peace

Friday, Nov 1
Review + Giveaway at I Am, Indeed

Saturday, November 2
Review at The Most Happy Reader
Interview at Words And Peace

Sunday, November 3
Review  at Queen of All She Reads

Monday, November 4
Review  at Walkie Talkie Book Club

Tuesday, November 5
Review at Griperang’s Bookmarks

Wednesday, November 6
Spotlight at Caffeinatedlife.net