Books to Read Now if You're Headed to Paris

A middle aged woman escapes pandemic New York for a life of Parisian decadence in this buzzed about memoir that W Magazine named one of the best, most talked-about books of 2024 and called "a journey of radical pleasure filled with good friends, good food, good wine, and good sex.”

French readers went crazy for this psychological nailbiter about the special relationship between a Parisian couple and their seemingly perfect nanny - and there’s even an HBO series in the works courtesy of Nicole Kidman and Maya Erskine. Condé Nast Traveler was taken by this thriller’s "deeply intelligent excavation of fraught themes like class, sexism, motherhood, and moral goodness…You should read this when you're already strapped into your seat on the plane because if you read this before boarding, you may become so enthralled that you miss your flight to Paris."

The celebrated restaurant critic’s new novel is a heartfelt adventure through the food, art, and fashion of 1980s Paris that follows Stella, a woman who's been gifted a one-way ticket and a note that says "Go to Paris," by her estranged, now deceased, mother. "Stella decamps to the City of Light--and pungent goat cheese, chilled wine, garlicky snails--in this giddy, escapist confection from Ruth Reichl, food writer par excellence," declared Vanity Fair.

This ribald historical novel from the author of Delphi takes place against the backdrop of 1600s Versailles, where a group of mostly female intellectuals gather weekly at a creative Parisian salon to practice the art of storytelling. "Those in search of a bawdy fairy tale should look no further than Pollard's novel set during the reign of Louis XIV," declared The Los Angeles Times in its list of “20 new books you need to read this summer."

Written by a bestselling French author, documentary film director, and journalist, this “sinewy, tough, sharp” coming-of-age novel explores one French woman’s decades-long evolution of sexuality, bodily autonomy, friendship and swimming in a manner that The Atlantic found refreshing: “In some sense, this memoir is for people who are the tiniest bit tired of memoir. It gives one the feeling of greater understanding, a sudden, expansive view from the top of a hill.”

Step into the shadowy streets of 1950s Paris with the 2014 Nobel laureate’s “lush fever dream filled with glamor, mystery, and despair" that revolves around an enigmatic young woman nicknamed Louki who haunts the Condé cafe. “The genius of Modiano's work lies in how it straddles the very real moral chaos of post-Vichy France and his creation of an idiosyncratic milieu,” observed the New York Journal of Books.

In this fictionalized French memoir, a family receives a cryptic postcard listing the names of four ancestors who perished in the Holocaust, setting off a suspenseful quest to find out who sent it and why. This new translation was a 2023 Natalie Portman’s book club pick and named one of the best books of the last year by The New Yorker: “Berest uses novelistic techniques to give the novel both a detective story’s page-turning urgency and the immediacy of life as it unfolds.”

"This shrewd, episodic novel” written by a former security guard offers a poignant take on Franco-African history as seen through the eyes of three undocumented African security guards in Paris whose “watchful eyes examine Parisian turmoil over two generations," according to the New York Times.

In a memoir that “revolves around a practice of extreme--deranged, even--candor,” the renowned author embarks on a journey of self discovery at a silent retreat but is forced to leave early when his life in Paris begins to unravel. “I would gladly read a hundred pages of Carrère scrutinizing the 'huge caverns' of his nostrils, lingering on the way that air prickles and tingles against their walls," declared The New York Times Book Review.

A Parisian apartment building's concierge and 12-year-old resident take up an unforgettable intellectual and philosophical liaison in this "fable of love, friendship and the beauty of art [that] not only gives innocence a voice, but also shows what a powerful novel can do: transport, educate and, ultimately, console," according to The Toronto Star.