A deft and witty excursion to Paris for coffee with Sartre, de Beauvoir et alia by Sarah Bakewell; a winter and spring on the shores of Lake Baikal with only a portable library and ice - and... read more
When Matisse was commissioned by the collector Albert C. Barnes (of what became the Barnes Foundation) to create a monumental mural - The Dance - he began to arrange his composition using ... read more
A powerful coming-of-age story - and its consequences for others - by the French-Mauritian writer who won the Prix Femina des Lyceens for The Tropic of Violence.
Gabriel Cromer (1873-1934) was a French photographer who assembled a remarkable collection that ranges from photography's beginnings to c.1890. This collection never found a permanent home o... read more
Auguste and Gausserand met at a pottery school in Montpellier in 1948. For the next seventy years they would share studios in small towns in the south of France, amongst a community of post-... read more
The spirited companion volume to her Days in the Caucasus: reaching Paris, she cuts her hair and swirls with the beautiful people of 1920s' Paris - Malraux and Kazantzakis, fellow emigr?s ... read more
A Japanese man tries to form a relationship with his half-French child, who has grown up on the other side of the world. The other side of the story told in A Single Rose, this nevertheless ... read more
By extraordinary chance, the author discovered an address book in the inner pocket of a vintage diary dating back to 1951. It disclosed an amazing list of luminaries from the European avant-... read more
The author's investigation of her family's history and her own identity was sparked by the arrival of an anonymous postcard bearing four names that arrived over forty years after those four ... read more
A young farm lad falls asleep in a boat and drifts down the river: a week of liberated, pastoral bliss ensues. First published in 1945, this is the first new translation since the 1950s. By ... read more
Recounts the author's quest for Adele Hugo, who followed the object of her (unrequited) love, a British soldier, to the Caribbean, and then returned to live out the rest of her days in a Fre... read more
Hugely successful in France, this autobiographical novel moves from the author's happy childhood in Algeria to Paris, where she navigates her own sexuality and the tensions of existing betwe... read more
Accompanies the exhibition in Chicago and at the Getty Center. Though Claudel's legacy has been overshadowed by Rodin, she was a superb and innovative sculptor in her own right.
Brighton, 1968: a film producer, a novelist and an actress find their private lives encroaching into their public worlds. Pressures build on the trio...
A slim, charming and witty riff on Proustian themes - the shallowness of society, the impossibility of love, the enduring power of art... Life-affirming!
A facsimile edition of Carmontelle's original, illustrated presentation of the 8-hectare garden he designed for the Duc de Chartres in 1779, on the cusp of the French Revolution. It had an i... read more