Following the Ghost of Modigliani’s Muse

We featured it here on France Book Tours, and Linda was also part of our webinar on French artists in fiction.

Today, Linda offers us “a brief look at the research and writing process behind her prize-winning novel Loving Modigliani: the Afterlife of Jeanne Hebuterne. a love story, a ghost story, a hunt for a missing masterpiece.”
“Imaginative, brilliantly researched, cross-genre historical fiction.”–Kirkus.

Click on this picture to access Linda’s flaneur guide to the places in her novel, with fascinating pictures and comments:

And now, more details on her book:

Loving Modigliani:
The Afterlife of Jeanne Hébuterne,
by
Linda Lappin

Historical mystery

 Published December 15, 2020
at Serving House Books
Available in many places
(ebook and paperback)

344 pages

Amedeo Modigliani, embittered and unrecognized genius, dies of meningitis on a cold January day in Montparnasse in 1920.
Jeanne Hébuterne, his young wife and muse, follows 48 hours later, falling backwards through a window. Now a ghost, Jeanne drifts about the studio she shared with Modigliani—for she was not only his favorite model, but also an artist whose works were later shut away from public view after her demise.
Enraged, she watches as her belongings are removed from the studio and her identity as an artist seemingly effaced for posterity, carried off in a suitcase by her brother. She then sets off to rejoin Modigliani in the underworld.
Thus begins Loving Modigliani, retelling the story of Jeanne Hébuterne’s fate as a woman and an artist through three timelines and three precious objects stolen from the studio: a notebook, a bangle, and a self-portrait of Jeanne depicted together with Modi and their daughter.
Decades later, an art history student will discover Jeanne’s diary and rescue her artwork from oblivion, after a search leading from Paris to Nice, Rome, and Venice, where Jeanne’s own quest will find its joyful reward.

Check the book trailer!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Prize-winning novelist, poet, translator, and lifelong wanderer
Linda Lappin writes stories rooted in place and memory.
Originally from Tennessee, she has spent much of her life in Rome,
and the landscapes of Italy, France, and Greece have deeply shaped her work.
Her fiction explores women on the edge of transformation,
weaving together history, myth, mystery, and the uncanny
in novels such as The Etruscan, Signatures in Stone, and Loving Modigliani.
Her novel Katherine’s Wish offers an intimate portrait of writer Katherine Mansfield
during the last five years of her life.
Loving Modigliani won the Women’s Fiction category
in the Indie Reader Awards in 2021,
was shortlisted for the Daphne du Maurier Awards,
selected for the Montaigne Medal for distinguished books,
and was the 2024 winner in Historical Fiction for the Indie Author Project.
Her newest novel, Melusine & the Watery Mind, is forthcoming from Serving House Books.

Check her website and subscribe to hear about her upcoming books.
You can also follow her on Instagram.

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1 kinlde copy (US residents only)

Mystery novella

April 21, 2025
at Kindle Direct Publishing
Also available as paperback
Available in Italian

47 pages

PARIS NOIR: Stefano, an aspiring writer, arrives in Paris determined to write his first novel.
There he becomes obsessed with Isabelle, a young woman glimpsed on a houseboat. Soon, his pursuit of Isabelle becomes inseparable from the novel he is writing.
But to win her, Stefano must outmaneuver a mysterious rival — only to discover that both his manuscript and his romance with Isabelle may already have been stolen from him.
A seductive metafictional noir unfolding through the hidden corners of Paris.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sergio Baldassarre is an Italian writer, poet, video maker,
amateur actor/director, and Glottodrama instructor
who lives between Rome and Tuscia.
He gained his theater experience through the
Teatro della Contaminazione in Rome
under the direction of Cristine Cibils.
Over the years, he has written, directed, and performed in several short films,
and has also published three poetry collections dedicated to place and travel.
His artistic work explores creativity as a means of self-expression, liberation,
and inquiry into the hidden dimensions of experience.
His debut novel, Un Amore Alieno a Creta (An Alien Love on Crete),
is currently being translated into English.
L’homme de l’Ile Saint-Louis celebrates his love for Paris, a city that imprints itself on the soul.

Check his website, rich with many creative projects

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3 print copies (US/UK residents)

Literary fiction
The source novel for Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly!

First published in French in 1887
First new English translation in over a century,
by Clémence Aubert
Espresso Publishing House

Release day: July 14, 2026 – Bastille Day!
(Kindle and paperback)

222 pages

Check the book on Goodreads

A French naval officer arrives in Nagasaki in 1885. He arranges a temporary marriage to a young Japanese woman — he calls her Chrysanthème, after the flower. He will stay for three months, then leave for sea. The arrangement is practical: a house on the hillside above the harbor, a few household objects, a sum paid to the family. What he does not expect is the quality of his own perception.

Loti watches everything and records everything: the harbor light, the paper screens, the small domestic ceremonies, the distance between his understanding and hers. The irony the novel earns is not cheap — Loti knows he is a guest in a world he will never enter, and he does not flatter himself. The failure of comprehension may be mutual; that is the book’s quiet, unsentimental heart.

The genealogy runs directly: John Luther Long read Loti before writing his 1898 short story, David Belasco staged Long, Puccini saw Belasco — and one of the most-performed operas in the world began with this book. The opera made it a love story; the novel, restored to its own register, is something stranger and more honest.

For readers of nineteenth-century French literature, Japan-meets-Europe and Japonisme writing, the cultural history behind Puccini’s repertoire, and the work of Pierre Loti — author of Le Mariage de Loti, Aziyadé, and Pêcheur d’Islande — this is the novel returned to literary English for the first time.

Translation by Clémence Aubert from the Calmann-Lévy text; introduction by Idara Crespi tracing the European Japonisme that runs from Loti to Debussy to Puccini; historical notes and translator’s glossary.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pierre Loti (1850–1923),
born Louis Marie-Julien Viaud,
was a French naval officer
and one of the most widely read French novelists
of the late nineteenth century.
He served on naval postings across the Mediterranean,
the Pacific, and the Far East,
and his fiction draws directly on his ports of call
— Tahiti (Le Mariage de Loti, 1880),
Senegal (Le Roman d’un spahi, 1881),
Brittany (Pêcheur d’Islande, 1886),
Japan (Madame Chrysanthème, 1887),
and Turkey (Aziy adé, 1879).

He was elected to the Académie française in 1891 (the picture was taken on the day of his reception).
Henry James and Marcel Proust both admired him;
his work shaped European literary Japonisme
and went on to influence Puccini’s Madama Butterfly through John Luther Long and David Belasco.
He died at Hendaye in 1923.

This English edition is translated by Clémence Aubert,
with an introduction by Idara Crespi, founding publisher of Espresso Publishing House.
Idara was born in Milan, grew up between Italy and Canada, and lives in Calgary;
she started Espresso Publishing House to bring overlooked foreign-language fiction
into English in editions that match the books they are.

Espresso Publishing House publishes new translations of French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Russian classics. More languages coming!
If you want to receive news of their new publications, sign up here.

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5 e-copies (epub or pdf) available,
for an honest review on your blog, Goodreads, Amazon, or social media.

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