Sebastian Faulks, Paris Echo

- It doesn’t take long to get really sucked in by this story. The characters are delightful and the Paris setting enchanting. But there is a terrible darkness underneath it all. 

- The history of France and particularly Paris features strongly in the story - the Nazi occupation in WW2 and the brutal Algerian independence conflict afterwards. France as both occupied and occupier. Although occupied, a majority of French people (at least initially) cooperated with the Germans in their rule, and in their rounding up of the Jews for transportation to Poland for extermination. ‘That the people who herded them in and locked them up, then put them on buses were not Germans with guns and dogs but the gendarmes they saw every day on the street’.

- The Resistance gained strength only in the last two years. 

- It helps to read this book with a detailed map of Paris at your fingertips. So many streets and metro stations are named and they are integral to the story. Absolutely brings the city alive. The stark contrast between the low socioeconomic and the middle/upper class suburbs, and the French born and immigrant communities, are at the heart of the narrative. If you love Paris as much as I do then do yourself a favour and read this book.

- Hannah is an American academic who is researching how French women coped with the Nazi occupation from 1940-44, and what they thought of the Germans. The personal stories she uncovers are fascinating, as they’re focussed on domestic and family relationships as well as the tense political situation, not to mention their sometimes painful personal/sexual issues. In the years after the war ‘...so much was never said’. 

- Tariq’s struggle as a young, uneducated, poor African migrant is very well told. His ancestry as Berber, Bedouin, Muslim, African, made him feel he ‘was part of something larger, more invigorating’. His discussions with the old man ‘Victor Hugo’ whom he meets on the Metro are stimulating. ‘According to [Victor] it was the historic duty of his country to be a light and an example, the guardian of freedom for the world. In his version of events it was the French not the Jews who were God’s chosen people.’

- Fundamentally this beautiful, empathetic novel is a love story, and an exceptionally good one.