The War Begins in Paris
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER | Winner of the Nebraska Book Award | 2024 Omaha Reads Book Pick
From the author of Kings of Broken Things and In Our Other Lives comes a "powerful, immersive" literary noir about two female World War II correspondents whose fates intertwine in Europe (Caitlin Horrocks).
Paris, 1938. Two women meet: Mielle, a shy pacifist and shunned Mennonite who struggles to fit in with the elite cohort of foreign correspondents stationed around the city; the other, Jane, a brash, legendary American journalist, who is soon to become a fascist propagandist. When World War II makes landfall in the City of Lights, Mielle falls under Jane’s spell, growing ever more intoxicated by her glamour, self-possession, and reckless confidence. But as this recklessness devolves into militarism and an utter lack of humanity, Mielle is seized by a series of visions that show her an inescapable truth: Jane Anderson must die, and Mielle must be the one to kill her.
Structured as a series of dispatches filed from around Europe and based on the misadventures of a real journalist-turned-Nazi mouthpiece, The War Begins in Paris is a cat-and-mouse suspense that examines the relentlessness of propaganda, the allure of power, and how far one woman will go for the sake of her morality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wheeler (In Our Other Lives) delivers an evocative and well-crafted story of two American journalists on a potentially fatal collision course in WWII Europe. Jane Anderson, "famous for her audacity, her beauty, her appetite for headlines," elicits admiration and resentment from her peers. Unlike the graceful and charismatic Anderson, glum Marthe Hess can only move "like a stork stuck in mud," due to a childhood injury. Despite their differences, the women bond when they meet in Paris in 1938. Hess is flattered to be considered a friend of her celebrity colleague, and to be taken into Anderson's confidence. A prologue foreshadows the friendship's dark turn, revealing that after the German occupation of France, the relationship will deteriorate to such an extent that Hess would "one day cross the border into Germany with the intention of killing her friend Jane." As the story develops, Wheeler moves back and forth in time to show what takes his protagonists to the brink of violence. He effectively makes uses of the Damoclean sword he's devised to maintain suspense, and the book's ornate prose captures the period's unsettling combination of horror and progress, such as in the description of a new arena in Berlin: "Newly encased in clean white stucco, it looked baroque in that gleaming German way, like a stone block dropped from the heavens." This is one to savor.
