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A Novel
by Mamta Chaudhry
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.
"Haunting Paris is a graceful debut from Chaudhry ... revealing a finely textured world where grief and love commingle. Julien's spirit travels across time but keeps careful vigil over Sylvie, their separate paths nonetheless a powerful testament to the enduring strength of the bonds we form in life." —Booklist
"[A] story of unresolved anguish and late love. Chaudhry's elegant debut ... might well touch a popular nerve." —Kirkus Reviews
"Chaudhry's debut is a heart-wrenching love letter to Paris" —Publishers Weekly
"This is a powerful and moving first novel. Reading it, I thought of Patrick Modiano and W. G. Sebald, master novelists similarly haunted by the horrors of WW II and the occupation of France. It's audaciously, imaginatively constructed, with a heartbreaking, profoundly adult love story at its center." —Russell Banks, author of Cloudsplitter and Continental Drift
"Haunting Paris explores dark questions--loss, grief, unforgiveable crimes--but the novel itself is full of light and life and beauty. All the characters, even Coco the dog, seem touched with grace as Mamta Chaudhry tells her absorbing story. A wonderful debut." —Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author of Mercury and The Flight of Gemma Hard
This information about Haunting Paris was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mamta Chaudhry's fiction, poetry, and feature articles have been published in the Miami Review, The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Telegraph, The Statesman, Writer's Digest, and The Rotarian, among other publications. She lives with her husband in Coral Gables, Florida, and they spend part of each year in India and France. Haunting Paris is her first novel. www.mamtachaudhry.com
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