France Book Tours Alphabet: C is for…
C
is for
Ruth Hull CHATLIEN
SYNOPSIS
As a clever girl in stodgy, mercantile Baltimore, Betsy Patterson dreams of a marriage that will transport her to cultured Europe. When she falls in love with and marries Jerome Bonaparte, she believes her dream has come true—until Jerome’s older brother Napoleon becomes an implacable enemy.Based on a true story, The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte
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C
is also for
Adria J. CIMINO
SYNOPSIS
There are encounters that make a difference. The paths of four strangers cross amid the beauty, squalor, animation and desolation found on a Parisian street called the Rue des Martyrs.
Each one faces some sort of struggle:
A young man’s search for his birth mother leads him to love and grim family secrets.
An unsatisfied housewife finds her world turned upside down by the promise of a passionate liaison.
An aging actor, troubled by the arrival of the son he abandoned years ago, must make a choice: either lose him forever or put aside pride and seek redemption.
A young woman, betrayed by her fiancé, travels to Paris to begin a new life and forget about love… at least that is her intention.
Four stories entwine, four quests become one in Paris, Rue des Martyrs
and
C
is also for
Susan CONLEY
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.
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