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PARIS NEVER LEAVES YOU

Ellen Feldman

The war is over, but the past is never past. Living through World War II working in a Paris bookstore with her young daughter, Vivi, and fighting for her life, Charlotte is no victim, she is a survivor. But can she survive the next chapter of her life?
Alternating between wartime Paris and 1950s New York publishing, Ellen Feldman's PARIS NEVER LEAVES YOU is an extraordinary story of resilience, love, and impossible choices, exploring how survival never comes without a cost. ELLEN FELDMAN, a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of Terrible Virtue, The Unwitting, Next to Love, Scottsboro (shortlisted for the Orange Prize), The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (translated into nine languages), and Lucy. Her novel Terrible Virtue was optioned by Black Bicycle for a feature film.
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Published 2020-08-02 by St. Martin's Griffin

Comments

AUS: S&S Australia ; Czech: Grada ; Italy: Sperling ; Israel: Tchelet

A fluid, rich, and nuanced novel, expertly crafted, guaranteed to follow you around long after you've turned the last page. I gulped it down.

Completely compelling. I tore through it. This novel pivots on how we manage to survive surviving... Charlotte's visceral story will stay with me.

Feldman's powerful exploration of some of the most profound questions about love and loyalty resonates strongly today: What would you do to save your child? What is morality in wartime? How do we make peace with the past?

Ellen Feldman's writing is riveting in this beautiful novel that tells the bittersweet story of a young mother's strength and survival during WWII. From a tiny bookstore in Nazi-occupied Paris to a post-war New York publishing house, Feldman effortlessly captures the terror, immediacy, and inextinguishable human spirit.

...a vivid and precise portrait of that city under German occupation during the Second World War, but it is also an exploration of the courage and cowardice of those bitter years, as well as offering a slyly persuasive love story. The swift, engrossing narrative conceals, in the best way, the fact that Feldman is also giving us a wise and troubling lesson about the great moral crisis of the last century.

Masterful. Magnificent. A passionate story of survival and a real page turner. This story will stay with me for a long time.

A thrilling achievement... I was thoroughly drawn into a deep, rich, vivid world of engrossing characters and emotional and moral crises...a great piece of writing in every way.

This is an exquisite novel one that gives us what we're hungry for: an intelligent, complex female character who challenges our ideas of right and wrong, morality and immorality. We're reminded, too, of the dangers of drawing easy, swift conclusions. Feldman achieves all of this with wholly admirable precision and wit; she takes aim and does not miss.

Feldman's characters - in the Paris bookstore that harbors many secrets or the Manhattan publishing house with its marvelous cast of misfits - are both terrifying and utterly engaging. With more twists and turns than the back streets of Paris, the story is as propulsively readable as a spy novel, and as rich and psychologically rewarding as only the finest literature can be.