This is a fictionalized biography of the French Revolutionary patriot and writer Jeanne Manon Roland de la Platiere (1754-1793), who became known simply by Madame Roland. She was the daughter of a Paris engraver who encouraged his daughter's interest in music, painting, and literature. As a young girl, she told to her grand-mother: "I'll call myself daughter of the Seine," and as an adult she often said that the river was part of her soul. As a young woman she became interested in the radical ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the movement for equality. She shared these enthusiasms with her husband, whom she married in 1780. After the outbreak of the Revolution, she formed a salon of followers, who late became known as the Girondists. Under the constitutional monarchy, her husband became minister of the interior, a post he held after the monarchy was overthrown. Madame Roland both directed her husband's career and influenced the important politicians of the period.(

An American Library in Paris "Coups de Coeur" Selection A Los Angeles Times Bestseller "Elaine Sciolino is a graceful, companionable writer.… [She] has laid one more beautiful and amusing wreath on the altar of the City of Light.” —Edmund White, New York Times Blending memoir, travelogue, and history, The Seine is a love letter to Paris and the river that determined its destiny. Master storyteller and longtime New York Times foreign correspondent Elaine Sciolino explores the Seine through its lively characters—a bargewoman, a riverbank bookseller, a houseboat dweller, a famous cinematographer—and follows it from the remote plateaus of Burgundy through Paris and to the sea. The Seine is a vivid, enchanting portrait of the world’s most irresistible river.

A charming memoir from one of America’s best-loved novelists, William Wharton, author of war-time classic ‘Birdy’.

Monsieur Perdu can prescribe the perfect book for a broken heart. But can he fix his own? Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life. Using his intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls. The only person he can't seem to heal through literature is himself; he's still haunted by heartbreak after his great love disappeared. She left him with only a letter, which he has never opened. After Perdu is finally tempted to read the letter, he hauls anchor and departs on a mission to the south of France, hoping to make peace with his loss and discover the end of the story. Joined by a bestselling but blocked author and a lovelorn Italian chef, Perdu travels along the country’s rivers, dispensing his wisdom and his books, showing that the literary world can take the human soul on a journey to heal itself. Internationally bestselling and filled with warmth and adventure, The Little Paris Bookshop is a love letter to books, meant for anyone who believes in the power of stories to shape people's lives.

In the late autumn of 1889, the body of an unknown woman appeared on the banks of the Seine River in Paris. It was taken to the city morgue behind Notre Dame and put on display for a month, according to protocol. The eerie beauty of the young woman's expression attracted crowds but no claimant, and so, before the body was dispatched, a mold was taken of the face, yielding a mask which was to become one of the most celebrated cult objets/curios of the 20th century. Set during the final days of the Paris expo of 1889, Brooks Hansen's The Unknown Woman of the Seine sets out to solve the mystery of who the woman was behind the mask. In charge of that investigation is a former Gendarme and recent prisoner of war just returned from Tonkin, China. Henri Brassard is on his way to Paris, determined to reclaim his place in La Force when he crosses paths with a mysterious and unnamed young maiden and her gypsy wagon. Detecting villainy, and bent on proving himself to his former superiors, Brassard tracks her into the city and observes from the shadows as, with evident but inscrutable purpose, she wends her way into the orbit of several savory and unsavory characters--an Artist, an Impresario, a Madame, a Countess, and one Disciple even--each of whom sees in her some opportunity, a chance for profit or redemption; any one of whom may therefore be responsible for her sudden and unexplained disappearance. On that account, Brassard's chase will lead him on a grand tour of the city's lushest and seamiest venues, from its highest spires down into its darkest, dankest catacombs and past a gallery of equally diverse crimes--the moral, the political, the maniacal. By the end, he will, in fact, learn the stunning truth of the unknown woman's true identity, her past and present, but not before unearthing the equally disturbing truth about himself, who he has been, and who he must become.