Someone Else

Elizabeth Teller, a forty-something Anglo-American living in Paris, has it all: a well-connected French architect husband, four children and a job as editor at a revered French publishing house. But with the sudden appearance of a former lover, a less glorious past comes back to haunt her. The dream life begins to crumble. A darker side of pretty Paris emerges.


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“A gripping Paris coming of age story, not the usual trite tale of young would be artists groping in their wistful way into mostly wishful futures, this is rather the struggle to maturity of a grown woman who is forced to come to terms with a past which terribly reveals itself and puts the life she has made, as the American wife of a well to do Frenchman, and her own most intimate vision of herself at risk. This is an everyday Paris with which few English language readers are familiar, and the range of emotional relations with which the book deals—work, marriage, family, sex, and love young and older and old—is remarkable and heartening.”


C.K. Williams, poet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award


“Written in a distinctive and luminous style, Someone Else is both a meditation on and an evocative portrait of how past events affect and destroy a seemingly perfect marriage and how the consequences will forever alter the lives of the characters -- for ultimately, perhaps, more mindful and authentic ones.”


Lily Tuck, novelist, winner of the 2004 National Book Award


“Brew a cup of tea, put on your most comfortable outfit, silence the phone, and read Mary Fleming’s Someone Else. Elizabeth Teller has carefully constructed a life in a beautiful Paris quartier with her architect husband Lucas, and her four children. She plays the role of perfect wife and mother, and enjoys her work as a busy editor at a large publishing house. She’s learned how to obey the French conventions that guarantee her a place in a prominent family. But when Elizabeth bumps into an old friend on his first trip to Paris, a moral dilemma she’s refused to confront is suddenly unavoidable. Her lovely life begins to crumble and then to break. ‘Someone Else’ keeps the reader enthralled and entertained, hoping for the best while fascinated by the consequences of a terrible mistake.”


Laura Furman, author of ‘The Mother Who Stayed’ and series editor of The O. Henry Prize Stories


“Everyone carries guilty secrets. Some are slowly forgotten, others lie dormant, as if awaiting their moment to cause havoc. In Mary Fleming’s gripping new novel, Someone Else, Elizabeth Teller ran away from her secret - her betrayal of an American college room-mate in a prank that went horribly wrong – but it catches up with her years later. A long-time resident of Paris, Elizabeth sees an unexpected encounter with her former room-mate as anything but accidental, convinced he has come to exact revenge. Perhaps he has, but Elizabeth misreads the signs. In the comfortable setting of bourgeois Paris, Mary Fleming skilfully guides us through the dark passages where guilt feeds greedily on tortured consciences. After reading Someone Else, no one will feel their secrets are safe.”


Alan Riding, author of And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris, former European Cultural Editor for The New York Times