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    Paris by the Book: A Novel
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    Paris by the Book: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Paris by the Book: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    Paris by the Book: A Novel

    Written by Liam Callanan

    Narrated by Kim Bubbs

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A missing person, a grieving family, a curious clue: a half-finished manuscript set in Paris. Heading off in search of its author, a mother and her daughters find themselves in France, rescuing a failing bookstore and drawing closer to unexpected truths.

    Once a week, I chase men who are not my husband. . . .

    When eccentric novelist Robert Eady abruptly vanishes, he leaves behind his wife, Leah, their daughters, and, hidden in an unexpected spot, plane tickets to Paris.

    Hoping to uncover clues—and her husband—Leah sets off for France with her girls. Upon their arrival, she discovers an unfinished manuscript, one Robert had been writing without her knowledge . . . and that he had set in Paris. The Eady women follow the path of the manuscript to a small, floundering English-language bookstore whose weary proprietor is eager to sell. The whole store? Today? Yes, but Leah's biggest surprise comes when she hears herself accepting the offer on the spot.

    As the family settles into their new Parisian life, they can't help but trace the literary paths of some beloved Parisian classics, including Madeline and The Red Balloon, hoping more clues arise. But a series of startling discoveries forces Leah to consider that she may not be ready for what solving this mystery might do to her family—and the Paris she thought she knew.

    At once haunting and charming, Paris by the Book follows one woman's journey as her story is being rewritten, exploring the power of family and the magic that hides within the pages of a book.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateApr 3, 2018
    ISBN9780525527558
    Unavailable
    Paris by the Book: A Novel

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    Reviews for Paris by the Book

    3.5/5

    59 ratings16 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Leah Eady has relocated to Paris with her two teenage daughters in the wake of her husband's disappearance, in which a complete lack of evidence leaves Leah and her daughters completely in limbo as to whether he left them or has died. All Leah is left with is an incomplete manuscript from her husband that seems to foreshadow the life she has chosen to lead in Paris, running an English-language book store. However, when Leah and her daughters start to feel like they're seeing her husband around the city, they all must grapple with whether he's there or if grief is causing them to see phantoms of a man who is no longer there.Callanan has written a beautiful book that evokes the world and emotional life of Leah so very well, while also crafting a compelling plot that pulls the reader along. I went into reading this book having completely forgotten what it was about and why I had put it on The List and so the narrative was a surprise and a delight to me. Callanan describes Paris beautifully and in a way that will make readers long to visit or to return to the City of Lights. While some of the supporting characters feel a bit less fleshed out than Leah, Callanan's real focus is exploring Leah's internal emotional life and how she deals with being the one left behind and not knowing the fate of her husband. Recommended for readers who enjoy literary fiction with a bibliophile flavour.
    • 2/5
      The elevator pitch for this book must have been a Paris-smitten bibliophile’s dream book: an author vanishes leaving behind a wife and two adolescent daughters who find a clue that he might be in Paris, follow him there, end up staying, buy a bookstore, and continually scan the Paris streets for him. It’s a mystery, a love story, a love affair with Paris, and an emotional exploration of loss and remembrance. It’s one part Bemelman (author of the Madeline stories), one part Lamorisse (writer/director of The Red Balloon) and one part Modiano. It sounds incredibly enticing. And there are moments — more than just moments, to be fair — in which the mélange becomes something altogether new and a bit wonderful. Alas, there is also the difficult problem of going from elevator pitch to full-length novel. The huge leaps the reader is asked to take, the implausibility of some situations, the plot holes, and the tricksy business of 21st century passports and identity tracking, which make the reading at times a bit of a slog. Nonetheless, I think most lovers of Paris will still say they enjoyed the book. Just thinking yourself into Paris page after page is probably enough.And so, gently recommended for lovers of Paris only.
    • 2/5
      #WhiteLadyProblems
    • 1/5
      Bailed. Really wanted to jump into this....a bookstore...in Paris....a romantic mystery...what’s not to like? However, the sentence structure is very chopped up and doesn’t flow. After several pages of having to re-read sentence after sentence because they were pointlessly convoluted.....I bailed. 😞
    • 4/5
      I can’t seem to finish novels these days but this one held my interest. As others have noted, it is long-winded at times and needed editing. Also a bit unsophisticated about Paris, but the plot intrigued me.
    • 3/5
      This is a novel about an author who vanishes under mysterious circumstances, leaving his wife and two children uncertain of whether he is dead or alive. They move from Milwaukee to Paris and take up residence in a bookshop that they painted cherry red. I both found this novel to be a page turner, and found it emotionally to be a slog. I expected it to be a bit more frothy than it was. I think that often artists or authors who are terrible people come across as romantic; this book doesn’t really do that but aspects of the wife and children’s torturous uncertainty come across as abusive, and that makes for a long read. I think this book is compelling but if you’re looking for a summer read that lifts the spirits maybe skip this for another time.
    • 3/5
      With some judicious editing this could have been a 4 star book - as it was I lost interest - too long and too melododramatic
    • 3/5
      I finished this book really, really mad at the husband. This novel, set in Paris, is centered around an American family - a husband, wife, and two daughters. The husband disappears from their home in Milwaukee and the wife and daughters move to Paris, France, a few months later, thinking the trip will help them find answers in the few clues they have about the husband's disappearance. There are plenty of awkward incidents and some humor, but I failed to find much charm in this novel. The setting didn't change the fact that this family was grieving and struggling - all for a reason that made me angry by the conclusion.
    • 4/5
      Well-told but a little long winded. How well can you know someone else? Can you love them too much? How far would you go to get them back? Can you heal someone else’s pain? These are the questions Leah has to answer when her husband Robert goes missing. The search leads them to Paris and a bookstore and new friends and a new way of looking at each other.
    • 4/5
      This one tries to suggest it's a mystery, but really it's not. I categorise it as general fiction, as a woman and her two daughters follow a trail to Paris in hopes of finding her missing husband, who went for a run one morning and never came back. I'm probably rating it a little higher than I would have right after I finished it. Overall I have a feeling that the book is good, but thinking back to specifics, I remember I found the MC to be too remote, or too ... flighty? to really know enough to decide if I liked her or not. She just sort of floated along, while her two daughters came across as way too well adjusted and independent to be as affected by their father's disappearance as events in the book would have you believe. I can't say much more without giving the plot away, but suffice it to say it's a decent read, and the premise sounds like heaven - move to Paris to run a small bookshop. Sure - sign me up. At least for a year or two.
    • 3/5
      Digital audiobook read by Kim BubbsFrom the book jacket: When eccentric novelist Robert Eady abruptly vanishes, he leaves behind his wife, Leah, their daughters, and, hidden in an unexpected place, plane tickets to Paris. Hoping to uncover clues – and her husband – Leah sets off for France with her girls. [There] she discovers an unfinished manuscript Robert had been writing without her knowledge … and that he had set it in Paris. Mother and daughters follow the path of the manuscript to a small, floundering English-language bookstore whose weary proprietor is eager to sell. Leah finds herself accepting the offer on the spot. My reactionsI wanted to love this book. The author is from my home town, the beginning of the book is set in Milwaukee, and then the action moves to a city I love, Paris France. Plus, it’s a book about books. But …I never really connected with these characters. I didn’t understand this great love between Robert and Leah. He was always given to these “disappearing” acts and it was clear to me (so why not to Leah?) that he had some significant mental and/or emotional health issues. Her continued grief and inability to move on just drove me crazy. On the other hand, I can only imagine how devastating this was for her, especially with two little girls who NEVER STOPPED looking for their Dad. The twists and turns in the story gave me difficulty as well. It seemed all too convenient that they could suddenly get an extended visa, for example. I won’t mention other twists to avoid any spoilers. Bottom line, it’s a splendid premise, has some great atmospheric scenes highlighting Paris, includes MANY book references, but didn’t live up to my expectations. Kim Bubbs does a fine job narrating the audiobook. I could easily tell which character was speaking, and it moved at a satisfying pace.
    • 3/5
      Leah and Robert’s relationship is formed through literary connections, specifically two French children’s works: Madeline, and The Red Balloon. Leah has always wanted to visit Paris and Robert, a struggling writer, promises they will someday. They marry, have two daughters, and settle into a fairly typical American suburban lifestyle. But their relationship begins to fracture when Robert’s career stalls, and one day he just disappears, seemingly without a trace. Even as the family is trying to figure out what happened, they discover he left behind airline tickets for Leah and their children. Was this a hint? Could he have gone to Paris? They decide to make the trip and see what they find. After a few missteps they end up living in and operating a once-profitable Paris bookshop, but they never stop looking for Robert and hoping he will re-enter their lives.On one level, this works. Literary references abound, the wonders of Paris come through on the printed page, and the struggle to adjust to a new country is portrayed well. But: this is a family dealing with unresolved loss. While Robert’s spirit was nearly omnipresent, Leah and her daughters coped with it all a little too smoothly. Leah repeatedly decided not to talk to her teenage daughters about what they are going through. And somehow the daughters just carried on with their lives and occasionally even saved the day in difficult situations. I just didn’t buy it. There was also a lot of “is he/isn’t he” about Robert which made sense but went back and forth too many times.This was a decent read with some shortcomings.
    • 5/5
      Like a lot of other avid readers, I can’t resist at least taking a look at any book whose title includes the words “book” or “bookstore.” Sometimes even the word “library” does the trick. But as many times as not, I find that the plot doesn’t really interest me enough to read them, or I do read them and end up wishing I hadn’t. I’m happy to report that neither of those things happened with Liam Callanan’s 2018 novel Paris by the Book. This one, about an American woman and her two daughters who buy a failing Paris bookstore pushed all the right buttons, but there’s a lot more going on here than button-pushing.Leah Eady’s husband Robert writes children books, just not as many as he used to write. And these days Robert is taking way more writer’s breaks than he used to take, breaks during which he disappears from home for two or three days at a time. Robert uses the time to hole up in some quiet spot where he labors to turn out a more few pages toward his next book. Leah may not particularly like the idea, but by now she’s used to it. So when Robert disappears again she is not all that concerned at first; that comes later, after her husband has been missing for an entire week. Before he leaves, Robert often leaves little notes for his wife and daughters to find, but this time there’s nothing there – at least it seems that way. But then Leah uncovers tickets to Paris for herself and her daughters, and she wonders if the tickets might somehow be tied to Robert’s absence. She decides to take her children to Paris to see if they might find Robert there waiting for them – but he isn’t. What turns up instead is a partially completed novel that Robert has apparently been working on without her knowledge, a story set in a Paris bookstore owned by a family that sounds very much like hers. A close study of the partial manuscript leads Leah and her two girls to a small failing bookstore very much like the one in Robert’s story, so when the bookstore owner offers to sell the store to Leah she does what she thinks her husband wants her to do: she buys it. But where is he?Paris by the Book is all about a damaged American family in Paris, one searching desperately to find the missing piece that will make it whole again. Leah and her two girls settle into their new lives nicely, but all three of them feel as if Robert is out there somewhere watching them do it. The girls go to school and make new friends, and Leah, despite herself, is starting to feel as if she were single again. As the months go by, she begins to wonder if Robert could be dead, but she is not sure she really wants to know the truth. Perhaps that truth, whatever it is, would be even harder on the family than believing that he would walk through their bookstore’s door one day to tell them he was back.One of the things that most surprised me about Paris by the Book is how much I learned from it about Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline series of children’s books and about Leah’s all-time favorite book, one by Albert Lamorisse called The Red Balloon. Ellie and Daphne share their mother’s love of The Red Balloon and are thrilled to be living in the very Parisian neighborhood in which the book is set. These girls are definitely book people, so living above a bookstore is their idea of heaven. Leah explains her girls this way: “I have strange children. Or the world wanted me to think that way, at least when we lived in Wisconsin: my girls grew up loving to read. True, they liked milk, understood football, and were as bewitched by screens – TV screens, movie screens, and most definitely phone screens – as everyone else. But they were strange in that they loved reading above all else.”Bottom Line: Paris by the Book is a booklover’s dream. It features a weird little English-language bookstore in the heart of Paris and some of the world’s favorite children’s books. It’s about solving the mystery of a missing man who walked away from his family one morning without saying goodbye and hasn’t been seen since. It’s about the streets of Paris and what happens in the city’s little neighborhoods after all the tourists have called it a day. And most importantly, it’s about books and how loving them can sometimes change a family’s life for the better.
    • 3/5
      Paris by the BookLiam CallananMY RATING ⭐️⭐️⭐️▫️▫️PUBLISHERDutton PUBLISHEDApril 3, 2018A touching story of a family consumed by a mysterious disappearance that launches them on a literary journey in the City of Light. SUMMARYThey met outside a bookstore in Wisconsin! Leah, a former film student, whose favorite film was The Red Balloon by Albert Lamorisse and Robert, a struggling author, loved the Madeline books by Ludwig Bemelmans. The two continued to debate about which was better, even after they got married and had children of their own, two little girls. Both works are set in Paris, and Leah and Robert’s ultimate dream was to go to Paris, but there was never enough money. And then one day Robert went out for a run and totally disappeared. No one could find any trace of him, or knew whether he was dead or alive. Leah and the girls, Daphne, 14, and Ellie, 12, were devastated, confused and inconsolable. They don’t want to believe that he is dead, but they also can’t believe he would leave them for good. Perhaps it was time to go to Paris, maybe Robert was there. There are clues pointed in that direction, particularly a half finished manuscript about a family in Paris. Once they are there, it’s not long before they are living above and running a failing bookstore...and believe they are seeing Robert everywhere. REVIEWParis by the Book is the story of a woman whose life has been usurped by her husband’s disappearance. Leah’s character is well developed and you can easily understand her struggle of not knowing if he is dead or alive. The mystery of Robert’s disappearance most definitively propels the narrative. Parts of the story are brilliant and fun, while a few parts are confusing and slow. Leah’s thoughts frequently are wandering here and there, pondering the past, struggling with the present and worried about the future. But who can blame her, given the situation. Book People and Paris lovers should appreciate this story. Not being familiar with The Red Balloon film, the book motivated me to watch it one afternoon. Very interesting! Liam Callanan is an American author and professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, his other novels include Cloud Atlas and All Saints. Thanks to Penguin for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
    • 3/5
      The sudden disappearance of her husband is nothing new to Leah Eady, he has done it again and again in the almost two decades they have spent together. He needs some time-out for his writing, to gather his ideas. But this time, things are different. She cannot find his “away-note”. He never leaves without a short letting them know that he’d be back again soon. When Robert does not show up again after weeks, Leah and her two daughters are devastated. Some clues lead her to believe that he could be in Paris and thus the three of them head for the French capital. Sometimes things just happen and later you cannot recollect what exactly was the decisive moment, so Leah finally finds herself in Europe owning a lovely bookshop. The longer they stay there, the more they adapt to their new life, a life without Robert. But every now and then, he shows up again. They see him in a picture, they imagine having crossed him in the streets. But: is he even still alive?The book sounded so lovely that I had to read it. A bookstore in Paris, a kind of extraordinary love story, the frequent allusion to Albert Lampoisse’s short film “The Red Balloon” – these are the perfect ingredients for a great feel-good bitter-sweet story. Yet, it did not completely catch me. Somehow there were too many breaks in the story, I never knew exactly where it was going too and thus it turned a bit lengthy at times. The characters unfortunately lived too much in the books they read and films they watched to ever find themselves really in Paris and therefore the charm of the town got completely lost. I liked the way the protagonist and her struggle with the situation are portrayed. Even though I think the construction of their relationship is too awkward to be authentic, the moment of not knowing what happened to her husband and being responsible for two teenagers while coping with your own emotions – that’s all but easy. Figuring out how to survive might lead to extreme decision like going to Paris and starting anew. All in all, there were lovely passages, but to sum it up: it is too long for the story that’s been told.
    • 3/5
      First there is the title: What an enticement! Paris and books; I GOTTA read this novel.Then there is the synopsis: An eccentric novelist who has gone missing. His grieving family. A bookstore. An unfinished manuscript by said missing novelist. I was already anticipating how wonderful this book would be. Then there is the first sentence: “Once a week, I chase men who are not my husband.” I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of this novel.And finally I did. Leah steals a copy of “The Red Balloon” from a Milwaukee book store. Robert sees, follows and confronts her. That’s how they met. The encounter sets up a sweet romance between the two who eventually get married and have two daughters.Leah and her daughter don’t think much about it when their Robert turns up missing. He does that a lot. When he gets stuck in his work, he goes on writeaways. He always leaves a note. But this time there is no note. Still, they shrug it off as sometimes the notes are left in the strangest places.Months pass, and the family goes about its daily life. Clues begin to surface in the strangest of places. One clue was six capital letters inside Robert’s favorite box of cereal. Quickly deciphering the code, Leah and her daughters head to France in search of Robert. Looking for a place to stay, they stumble upon a small bookstore, whose owner is eager to sell. Leah buys it and the family starts to settle in with an eccentric cast of supporting characters. Leah discovers one of Robert’s books on the shelves and places it in the store window. The girls are convinced that they catch glimpses of their father in various Paris locales, but Leah is convinced he is dead. When someone want to buy the book in the window, Leah discovers an “I’m sorry,” written on the inside cover. Who but Robert could have written that, and if did come into the shop, why didn’t he stay? There are so many questions with no answers.Then a manuscript by Robert turns up. It’s like he’s been watching them, writing as their lives unfold. This part of the novel was rather hazy for me.The story was interesting and I did enjoy it, but it moves rather slowly. Therefore, “Paris by the Book” receives 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.