As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve written a review for Shiny New Books, and it’s now up!
The book I wrote about is Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s by Anne Sebba and it really is splendid. Sebba has done an enormous amount of research to put together a very detailed, year-by-year picture of life in Paris for women, and she’s written it in a way that is completely engrossing. If you are even slightly interested in the history of the Second World War or in how people navigate complex moral choices under a poisonous authoritarian régime, this is a fascinating book to read.
I was also able to do a Q&A with the author about the background to Les Parisiennes, which you can find here. Anne Sebba worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters before turning her hand to non-fiction and biographies, and has a website here if you are interested. I could have asked her about a billion more questions but I didn’t want to be too nosy...