Paris Echo

September 10, 2018
Faulks (A Week in December) immerses readers into a haunted Paris through the exhilarating stories of a teenage Moroccan immigrant and an American historian researching the experiences of women during the German occupation of WWII. Hannah spent a lonely year abroad as a college student in Paris, and as she reconnects to the city and her past two decades later she becomes overwhelmed by the combined despair of her subjects and her own lonely life. Meanwhile, Tariq, a 19-year-old runaway from Morocco, wants to live in Paris like his mother, who was born there and died when he was a young boy. A mutual friend introduces Tariq to Hannah, and she agrees to take him on as boarder. While Hannah listens to the voices of Parisian women through historic recordings that she struggles to understand, Tariq explores Paris and picks up part-time jobs around the Muslim district. One of his employers, an Algerian man, speaks with unschooled Tariq about the French-Algerian War, explaining how Tariq’s half-Algerian mother’s life fits in within the bloody history. As Tariq and Hannah become closer, he helps her translate the French witness testimonies, slowly creating a dependency and bond as the translation work becomes more involved. As the atrocities of war are unearthed, Hannah and Tariq both must reconsider their beliefs about democracy and the role of Paris within the war. Fans of Paula McClain and Ian McEwan will enjoy Faulks’s touching tale of two Parisian visitors looking to reimagine their self-identities in a changing world.

September 15, 2018
A melancholy and mournful tale of the past's inextricable relationship to the present.Faulks (Pistache Returns, 2017, etc.) gives us a novel that uses World War II as a way to think about the contemporary refugee crisis and nationalist politics in Europe. He brings us the story of Tariq, a lovelorn, disaffected, and perpetually aroused Algerian teenager whose unfulfilling studies and infatuation with his virginal classmate Laila fill him with romantic dreams of fleeing his home for the streets of Europe. The son of a half-French, half-Arab woman whose father was a French settler, Tariq eventually abandons Algeria for Paris. Meanwhile, an American academic named Hannah arrives in Paris in order to do research on a historical project about the lives of Parisian women under the Vichy government during the war. Hannah is more concerned with the past than the present, but she feels increasingly empty in her history-obsessed life. As Tariq floats through the streets of Paris, looking for shelter and work, his and Hannah's paths eventually cross; soon, Tariq is a lodger in Hannah's apartment. Eventually, however, Hannah's obsession with the past collides with Tariq's complicated family history. Tariq soon finds that the hatred and xenophobia that drove French complicity with Nazi Germany and the settling of Algeria have not evaporated but taken on more subtle manifestations. Narrated in the first person from both Hannah's and Tariq's perspectives, this is a briskly told and engaging novel that sets us in the bustling streets of mid-2000s Paris. However, the prose is workmanlike, even dull at times, never rising to the lyrical heights of books whose subject matter this shares. The comparison might be unfair, but it's hard not to recall novels like Sebald's gorgeous Austerlitz when reading this novel, which suffers for the comparison. Tariq's and Hannah's voices are occasionally unconvincing. Taking Tariq as a hard-up teenage Algerian runaway is difficult when, after running into a mysteriously familiar woman on the Paris Metro, he utters, "I felt she was meant for me as the man I could become, as the man I deep down already am--an older, better man beneath all the clumsy, unimportant stuff of being young and useless and being me." Most unfortunately, the novel's twists are easy to see coming. Still, this is an entertaining novel with memorable characters.A fun romp through Paris and history, one that nevertheless makes us understand that the sins of the past are not truly past.

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September 15, 2018
Two travelers arrive in Paris. On the surface, Hannah, a thirtysomething American historian researching the lives of Parisian women during the Occupation, and Tariq, a Moroccan teenager hoping to learn something about his long-dead French mother, couldn't be more different, but, as we slowly realize over the course of Faulks' leisurely paced but enveloping novel, the two are really very much alike. Both have come to Paris not only to ferret out secrets lost to history, but also to grapple with failed relationships, Hannah's with an older man she met 10 years earlier, Tariq's with a girlfriend in Morocco who refuses to sleep with him. In a kind of play on rom-com conventions, Hannah and Tariq meet cute, and Hannah almost inadvertently offers Tariq her spare room. As the two carry on with their different researches?Tariq learning about French abuse of Algerians, Hannah grappling with the laissez-faire approach of many French women to the Nazis?Faulks offers a subtle but affecting portrait of friendship while exploring the immense difficulty of making sense of the larger world. As Tariq puts it, "I couldn't get any sense of history at all. Only the idle present."(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2018

Hannah, an American historian in Paris, is deep in her studies about women's lives during the Nazi occupation. But she's not so deep that she can't reach out when she meets Moroccan teenager Tariq, offering him friendship and shelter--especially important as they both have their ideals shattered. Faulks is the internationally best-selling author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2018

Paris newcomers Tariq, a Moroccan student looking for clues to his French mother's past, and Hannah, a postdoctoral researcher writing about the role of French women during the German occupation, are an unlikely pairing. But when Hannah offers Tariq a bed in the storeroom of her rental flat, the connection proves advantageous to them both. Working under the table at a sketchy chicken joint, Tariq is grateful for the cheap and cheerful accommodations, and Hannah is happy to have Tariq's help with translating interviews. Their time together is an education for Tariq, whose knowledge of history is pitiful. In turn, Tariq acts as a go-between for Hannah and an old colleague and admirer. Readers familiar with Tatiana de Rosnay's Sarah's Key and Charles Belfoure's The Paris Architect should recognize some of the history of the occupation--the roundup of French Jews at the Velodrome and their transport to Drancy, for instance--but Faulks (Charlotte Gray) shines new light on the experience of women during France's darker past. VERDICT An atmospheric, engrossing novel by a seasoned storyteller. [See Prepub Alert, 5/21/18.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.