Excerpt from Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'Your accent is too tight. You need to let your words fall.'

'Your English is good.'

Laure shrugged, Of course.

'I am sorry to bother you.' Her voice was posh, clipped, as though she spoke with her mouth full. Perhaps the formal address suited her better after all. She was sweet.

'It's only I saw you reading, and it's not the sort of thing I would normally do, but it's hot and it's Paris, isn't it?' She gave a silly laugh, and it occurred to Laure that here was a clever girl told it was better to be beautiful than clever.

The girl pulled her bag around to her front, a severe leather satchel in light brown, the sort of thing a schoolboy would carry. Laure watched her struggle with the buckles. There were no creases on the straps – the thing was brand new. A gift? It did not fit with her floaty skirt, the bardot top – was that cheesecloth? – and in fact none of it fitted. It was a costume, a thing put on to walk around Paris and do things she would never normally do. Her nails were unpainted.

She'd managed to wrestle a book from her bag, a poor reveal too long in the making, but she lifted aloft a copy of Fragments d'un discours amoureux, the exact same edition Laure held loosely in her own mauled fingertips, from the Collection Tel Quel. Laure's was marked with wine-glass rings across the white background, the image of tense and searching fingertips, the spine cracked and binding perilous, made thicker by her dog-eared pages. Erica's was pristine, as though never opened, though a metro ticket marked a third of the way in.

'And honestly, I thought I was mad. Pretentious, you know, to buy this let alone try to read it in public. I was talked into it by the bookseller. But then I saw you reading here, and smoking, and it made me laugh ...' Erica trailed off, realizing she had been insulting, but not realizing Laure loved to be insulted. 'Only I thought if a proper Parisienne were doing it, I could too.'

'Which bookshop?' asked Laure, knowing it would be Shakespeare and Co.

'Le Divan.'

Laure did not betray a flicker of surprise. 'My friend works there.'

'Oh! Perhaps she was the one. Dark hair?'

'No. Blonde.'

'Ah.' Erica dithered. 'And I hope you don't mind—' she rummaged in her satchel, and pulled out a camera, a boxy Canon AE-1 with a black lens cap. 'But I took a photograph from back there, because you do look very French. The picture I had in my head, anyway.'

Laure did not blink.

'I hope you don't mind,' she repeated. 'I can destroy the film if you do.'

Laure let her gaze trickle down Erica's face to the camera in her hand and back again, knowing she would blush, and she did, deliciously, from her slick collarbones to her round cheeks. She shrugged to show she didn't care, as though she was used to people taking her photograph and telling her they had done so. 'First time in France?'

'And Paris! Well, yes of course in Paris. Paris and France. First time anywhere actually, other than England. I've been to London, to the British Museum and the National Gallery, but I knew I couldn't think myself an art lover until I had been to Paris. I've been to the Louvre and the Petit Paris. There's the Pompidou of course, but I go there tomorrow. Today the weather is so good, I thought, why not walk to the Sacré-Cœur, see the church and sit on the grass and see the city from up here. I'm staying on the Rive Gauche, and it was further than I thought, and hotter too.'

She fanned herself demonstrably, and the camera strap flapped against her cheek. She blushed even more furiously. Laure wondered what she would look like naked.

Laure smiled perfunctorily, and pushed her glasses back up onto her nose. She meant that to be a dismissal, and was glad when the girl tripped up past her, up the left-hand steps of the Sacré-Cœur, and a little disappointed too, when she lost her scent – girlishly sweet, the sort you would get in a pharmacy – and turned to watch her disappear into the crowd making for the shade of the church.

Excerpted from Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. Copyright © 2026 by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. Excerpted by permission of Summit Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.