Paris is a city of overlapping connections. Each day, the lives of its denizens intertwine in a thousand small ways. In Alex George's glittering third novel, The Paris Hours, the paths of four ordinary people--each searching for something they have lost--become inextricably linked over the course of one day in 1927.
George (Setting Free the Kites) tells his story in brief alternating chapters, following four protagonists: Guillaume, a struggling painter; Souren, an Armenian refugee turned puppeteer; Camille, Marcel Proust's former maid; and Jean-Paul, a journalist laid low by grief. Each of them, in their pursuit of something--money, absolution, a reprieve, a chance to tell a long-buried story--encounters famous American expatriates: Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach. But these celebrities are only minor characters, serving to help or hinder George's characters on their quests. Camille saved one of Proust's notebooks for herself when he asked her to burn them; now she is searching the city for it. Guillaume engages in a series of increasingly dangerous negotiations to keep the wolf from his door. Jean-Paul, while profiling other people, longs to tell the one story he keeps closest. And Souren, haunted by his past, tries to find meaning and perhaps forgiveness through his puppet shows. As they move about the city, their paths--unbeknownst to each of them--cross and recross in ways that will have implications for them all.
Compelling and elegantly written, The Paris Hours is a tribute to love, grief and serendipity in the City of Light. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams