T he romantic boulevards and thriving nightlife of Paris have inspired writers from all over the world. We’ve compiled a list of novels set in the city, recommended by our expert interviewees, to help every Francophile find their next favourite book.
“I read Les Misérables when I was a kid and then re-read it last summer and…I am now convinced that it is the greatest novel of all time. Every story in the world is somewhere in there. It’s extremely sentimental, it’s extremely historical and digressive, there are parts of it that are boring as hell – but that’s true of War and Peace and other great novels. Overall, it’s such a compendious, wonderful thing, full of gems…He was an opponent of Napoleon III who had seized power in a coup d’état in 1851 and turned what had been a left-wing revolution into a – not vicious – but very authoritarian right-wing regime, and Hugo, who was a leading figure in French politics, objected and the Emperor said ‘Out you go’; many hundreds, thousands, of opposition figures were exiled, imprisoned or executed at that time…He was in exile on the island of Guernsey from where he could almost see France on a clear day. And one big dimension of Les Misérables is it’s a novel of nostalgia – he’s trying to reconstruct the Paris of his youth which he didn’t know if he would ever see again. In a sense, he never would because most of it had been rebuilt during the Second Empire by the time he got back.” Read more...
The Greatest French Novels
David Bellos ,
Biographer
“I love the atmosphere—he’s an incredibly atmospheric writer. It’s crepuscular; a word I would never use in my own fiction. It describes a beautiful, sad twilit Paris. There’s a moment when the narrator talks about his favourite time of day being the borderland after the sun has gone down but the sky is still blue and the streetlights haven’t come on yet. He talks about it being “the moment to lend an ear to echoes coming from afar,” which is, I think, a stunning image. And much of Modiano’s work is about the echoes that the past makes in the present.” Read more...
The Best Literary Thrillers
Chris Power ,
Novelist
“It’s a wonderful bird’s eye view of the French Revolution, which has been the birthplace of so much in modern life. It zeroes in on the lives and inner feelings of the leading participants, in particular the lives of Maximilien Robespierre and George-Jacques Danton. Mantel has a special intuitive talent for seeking out what makes people do what they do.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in France
David Lawday ,
Biographer
“This is probably the best-known work of fiction about perfume and the perfume industry. It’s a crime novel by a German author which was also made into a movie. It’s a very lush, richly imagined book. It just bursts with sensuality and the smells of Paris in the 18th century. And not just good smells, but also the smell of raw sewage running in the streets, or of horse manure. It’s about a lowly orphan boy who happens to be gifted with the olfactory equivalent of perfect pitch. He apprentices with perfume makers. He’s a very odd creature, and eventually he decides that he wants to create a perfume that will make people do his bidding. It will be so stupendous that it will overwhelm people and he can rule the world with this perfume.” Read more...
The best books on Perfume
Denise Hamilton ,
Journalist
“The Day of the Jackal is about Charles de Gaulle and an attempted assassination attempt on him. Forsyth is interested in French history, and the darkness in it. This book is about a real-life right-wing group called the OAS. It was a secret organization, a group of authoritarian army officers, who were trying desperately to hold on to Algeria. They didn’t like the fact that de Gaulle eventually, belatedly, realized that there was no hope of Algeria staying part of metropolitan France. And there was an attempted coup and assassination on him in real life. Forsyth writes this book in what is often described as a documentary or journalistic style…It’s a very interesting book. It’s always longer than you remember and it unfolds over quite some length. Because it’s so tightly written, you forget how much happens in it.” Read more...
Five Classic European Spy Novels
Patrick Worrall ,
Thriller and Crime Writer
“The book is really about the modernisation of the market and Paris, and French bourgeois society. It’s a study of the contrast of this individual who finds himself alienated from this rich, brilliant, new society. It is wonderfully described and even though much of that Paris has disappeared some of it is still around. The Belly of Paris is a wonderful book of imaginary history if you are at all interested in the creation of ‘modern Paris,’ meaning the city born in the mid-19th century.” Read more...
The best books on Paris
David Downie ,
Travel Writer
“This is the book that gave me, as a young girl, an idea of an older woman’s sexuality. Although it has a very, very sad ending—I literally cried when I read it—interestingly, the message that I took away from it was not that at 49 you are too old to have a lover, but that you are absolutely not too old.” Read more...
The best books on Sex
Susan Quilliam ,
Psychologist
“Notre-Dame de Paris is the tragic love story of the grotesquely ugly hunchback Quasimodo—a bellringer at Notre-Dame—and the wild and beautiful gypsy Esmerelda. They both die in the end. But what’s wonderful about the book is that good still triumphs over evil, at least for the reader. It shows the purity of love. It’s also a marvellous insight into late medieval Paris.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in France
David Lawday ,
Biographer
“I was impressed by the fact that Paris was a real city and had this underground quality to it. There could be really deeply subversive people living and working and creating here. I was particularly fascinated by Céline’s portrait of the city because Paris is one of the characters in the book. You get a real sense of what Paris looked like. Céline walked everywhere. He was a mad walker. He came from the suburbs and he lived and worked around Clichy and Courbevoie. When I first moved to Paris I lived for a year not far from Place de Clichy and I found myself going to the same places and seeing the same kinds of scenes described in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and they really seemed to be current—people hanging out in cafés and drinking madly and living much of their lives in a public sphere, outside on the streets.” Read more...
The best books on Paris
David Downie ,
Travel Writer
“Many people don’t appreciate what a big commitment writing this novel was for Hemingway. He was used to writing short stories. It meant he had to spend a lot of time on one book that could have been spent more profitably writing short stories. Like many of Hemingway’s later novels, it is stitched together from shorter pieces – in this case, what he’d already written about Pamplona…It can be summed up by the phrase ‘grace under pressure’, and looks at the code of ethics that emerges from bullfighting. It starts in Paris and then goes to Spain. The main event is a bullfight in Pamplona. The main characters are a group of expatriates, including a Jewish man, Robert Cohn, who was a boxing champion at Princeton. The narrator, Jake Barnes, was injured in World War One and his impotence is strongly suggested.” Read more...
The best books on Hemingway in Paris
Wai Chee Dimock ,
Literary Scholar
In Baldwin's second novel, an American expat living in the Bohemian bars and clubs of 1950s Paris grapples with his bisexual identity. Writing in The Guardian , the novelist Garth Greenwell said: "the whole novel is a kind of anatomy of shame, of its roots and the myths that perpetuate it, of the damage it can do. "
Read expert recommendations
“There’s a high-concept plot trigger here: the ‘anomaly’ of the title relates to an inexplicable event whereby a plane and all onboard are duplicated. One plane lands as normal, the other three months later, but other than that small fact they are identical. The repercussions from this, told across a multi-viewpoint narrative, the attempts to understand what happened and to uncover if indeed such an anomaly may have occurred before, are what drives this book, and indeed its million-plus readers to find out what happened.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction of 2023: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist
Tom Hunter ,
Journalist
“This is a book that made me think: wow, I didn’t know we were allowed to do that. For all sorts of reasons—some moral—but many of them literary. Carrère does not hesitate to put his personal failings on display—nay, to parade them, in this book. Yoga charts his mental breakdown, after several self-congratulatory years of career success and marital bliss. His dramatic self-destruction spools out in slow motion—but there is something liberating in that for the reader, to see a writer dissect their own inner workings so mercilessly and under such a clear, bright light.” Read more...
Editor’s Choice: Our 2022 Novels of the Year
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
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