To Capture What We Cannot Keep

September 15, 2016
A French engineer working on the construction of the Eiffel Tower meets a Glaswegian widow, and their romance is as risky as the tower project itself.Emile Nouguier is second-in-command to Gustave Eiffel, designing the tower that will mark the centennial of the French Revolution at the World's Fair of 1889. In 1886, construction of La Tour is just commencing. As her only surviving son, Emile has incurred his aging mother's disapproval for choosing engineering over active management of the family glass factory. During a tour of the construction site by balloon, Emile meets Caitriona Wallace, 31, a widow who has accompanied, as chaperone, two Scottish young adults, Alice and Jamie, the cosseted niece and nephew of a wealthy, childless Glasgow civil engineer. Cait's husband was killed in a bridge collapse, but the match would have been doomed by an incompatibility between the couple which Colin handles so discreetly that readers can only guess at its nature until the very end. Now, Cait's only options are positions such as this one or remarriage, but so far only one rich but repulsive suitor has presented himself. The attraction between Emile and Cait is instant but it takes several chapters of hesitation as each gradually sheds his or her own nationality's version of Victorian reticence. Emile's mother is dying and has been urging him to marry soon and produce grandchildren before it's too late, but he knows she will never accept Cait, a foreigner. Meanwhile, his ex-mistress Gabrielle has embroiled herself with Alice and Jamie, abetting the Scottish innocents' forays into the Parisian demimonde. Cait, oblivious to the full extent of her charges' indiscretions, dreads confessing what she does suspect to her employer, since it will necessitate a return to Glasgow and her own bleak future. Colin has a sure hand with the atmospheres of both cities and with the mores and dress of the period, and she manages to continually raise the stakes for her characters without ever resorting to melodrama. A novel of soaring ambitions, public and private.

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October 1, 2016
They meet while aloft in a hot air balloon over Paris in 1887. Caitriona Wallace is an impoverished Glaswegian widow acting as chaperone to the wealthy Arrol siblings as they travel Europe on their Grand Tour. One of Gustave Eiffel's engineers, Emile Nouguier, needs to marry among his class to please his mother and bolster the family finances. Although Alice Arrol is a naive teenager, she's a potential match for Emile, but he finds himself more intrigued by Cait. However, in returning his affections, Cait would be choosing passion over honor. Their beautifully restrained love story, told in a refreshingly unhurried manner and grounded in the era's social constraints, gains complexity as Alice and her brother, Jamie, rebel against their expected roles. Nouguier is a historical figure, and readers get a close-up perspective on the Eiffel Tower's step-by-step construction. Drawn with care and suffused with stylish ambience, Colin's (The Glimmer Palace, 2008) Paris is a city of painters, eccentric aristocrats, desperate prostitutes, secret lovers, and the magnificent artistic vision taking shape high above them. Devotees of the Belle Epoque should relish every word.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2016

Young widow Caitriona Wallace must make ends meet by chaperoning two young charges, while engineer Emile Nouguier is slated to take over the family business and find a wife who fits into the respectable bourgeoisie. When they meet in 1887, in a hot air balloon drifting above Belle Epoque Paris, they fall desperately in love. Their star-crossed relationship is told with the Eiffel Tower rising in the background. Colin's books include the award-winning The Glimmer Palace.

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