The Paris Hours

March 30, 2020
Set in Paris over 24 hours in summer 1927, George’s engrossing third novel (after Setting Free the Kites) interweaves the lives of four characters struggling with loss, loneliness, and secrets. A decade after Turkish forces drove Souren Balakian from his home in Anatolia, he attempts to exorcize terrifying memories through his puppet shows. Before fleeing Paris to avoid reprisal for unpaid debts, Guillaume Blanc decides to meet the daughter he believes was born from his tryst with a trapeze artist 10 years earlier. Camille Clermont has saved one of the notebooks her late employer, Marcel Proust, asked her to burn; when her husband sells it without her permission, she fears that a shameful secret she confided to Proust will become public. Journalist Jean-Paul Maillard interviews luminaries such as Josephine Baker, but his heart is in the unpublished book he wrote about his infant daughter, Elodie, who disappeared in 1918 amid the German shelling that killed his wife. By evoking fictional characters and historical figures with equal vividness and wisely using repeated motifs (a Ravel piece, a prostitute, a club, a painting), George unites his narratives in a surprising yet wholly convincing denouement. Elegant and evocative, this will have special appeal for lovers of Paris and fans of Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife.

Starred review from May 1, 2020

George's third novel (after Setting Free the Kites) is set in 1927 Paris, the heyday of Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Ravel. These real historical figures mingle with fictional characters to convey Paris during those years of artistic fruition. The everyday characters include Armenian refugee and puppeteer Souren, whose shows have a dark undertone that has special meaning only to him. Artist Guillaume must repay the money he owes to a loan shark before he is killed. Journalist Jean-Paul dreams of moving to America, and interviews various American expats, such as Josephine Baker, to satisfy his soul. There is also the tale of Marcel Proust's maid, a country girl named Camille who ends up being Proust's confidante. An artist, a writer, a puppeteer, and an author's intimate--the stories of these characters move back and forth in a beautiful dance. And how they come together in the final movement is tr�s belle! VERDICT George has captured the ethos of 1920s Paris with a feel similar to Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See. This title is not to be missed.--Beth Gibbs, Davidson, NC

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2020
Set in 1927, George's atmospheric third novel follows the lives of four ordinary Parisians, each seeking something they lost, over the course of a summer day. The book opens a few hours after midnight as Souren Balakian, an Armenian refugee haunted by traumatic memories of his flight from Ottoman Anatolia a decade before, prepares his puppets for his daily shows at the Jardin du Luxembourg. Impoverished painter Guillaume Blanc awakes, hungover and desperate to raise money to pay off a loan shark's debt that is due that day. Insomniac Jean-Paul Maillard, a journalist nursing physical and emotional wounds from the Great War, comforts himself listening to the music of George Gershwin. Camille Clermont arrives at a cemetery with her young daughter, Marie, to lay flowers on the grave of her former employer, writer Marcel Proust. As the day progresses, alternating chapters interweave these characters' pasts with their presents to gradually reveal tragedies and heart-wrenching secrets. The era's celebrities (Josephine Baker, Gertrude Stein, Maurice Ravel, Sylvia Beach, Ernest and Pauline Hemingway) make guest appearances in a name-dropping Midnight in Paris fashion. Despite some striking moments (a badly wounded Jean-Paul is moved by an impromptu piano concert in an abandoned church by an ambulance driver who turns out to be Ravel), other encounters feel forced. Likewise, in George's aim to get his four protagonists to the climax in a Montmartre jazz club, the loose connections he creates among them seem at times like heavy-handed contrivances. And despite the vividness of the stories being told, their power is undermined by the flatness of the character development. Still, the ambiguous ending will provide discussion fodder for reading groups. Despite its flaws, George's Proustian homage to a lost time will be a Francophile's madeleine.

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April 15, 2020
Jazz Age Paris continues to fascinate, and George taps into that wellspring of interest with this enchanting historical novel about four ordinary people on one day in 1927, with flashbacks providing backstory. Like the film Midnight in Paris, the novel features appearances from some of the artistic types living in Paris during the Jazz Age: Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, and more. All of them play supporting roles to the four, variously tormented leads: Camille, Proust's maid, searches for a volume of her employer's journal that she secretly kept after his death in 1922 and then lost; puppeteer Souren, who faced his own Sophie's Choice during the Armenian genocide, looks for salvation; painter Guillaume hopes that Gertrude Stein will set his life back on course; and writer Jean-Paul is marred by a WWI tragedy. As these four walk the sumptuously evoked streets, George cleverly brings their stories together in a stunning finale that should feel contrived but somehow doesn't. Or maybe we just don't care because the novel has put us under the spell of the City of Light yet again.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)