Haunting Paris
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Paris, 1989: Alone in her luminous apartment on Île Saint-Louis, Sylvie discovers a mysterious letter among her late lover Julien’s possessions, launching her into a decades-old search for a child who vanished in the turbulence of the Second World War. She is unaware that she is watched over by Julien’s ghost, his love for her powerful enough to draw him back to this world, though doomed now to remain a silent observer. Sylvie’s quest leads her deep into the secrets of Julien’s past, shedding new light on the dark days of Nazi-occupied Paris. A timeless story of love and loss, Haunting Paris matches emotional intensity with lyrical storytelling to explore grief, family secrets, and the undeniable power of memory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chaudry's debut is a heart-wrenching love letter to Paris masked as a wartime tragedy. Told from several perspectives, one of which is a ghost, the story is handed from Sylvie, a piano teacher in 1989 reeling from the death of her psychoanalyst husband, Julien; eventually to Julien himself, hovering in the ether as a saccharine-voiced revenant. In the bicentennial year of the French Revolution, a grieving Sylvie finds a folder that leads her on a search for information about members of Julien's family who were arrested in the tragic Vel d'Hiv Roundup in 1942, when 13,000 Parisian Jews were rounded up in a single night, many of them children. With empathy that Julien's ghost admits he lacked, Sylvie sets out to discover if her husband's niece may have survived, and in doing so begins to heal her own broken spirit. Julien is more than omniscient as he cedes the story to various historical figures, including those who witnessed that tragic night when his sister and her twins are taken. But every page about these Parisians and their fair city is so fraught with emotion that eventually they lose their impact. Readers who adore Paris and war stories may nevertheless forgive this very fine writer for not showing more restraint.
