Paris in Winter


Book Description

A newly expanded edition of the beloved Paris in Winter absorbs readers into magic of the City of Light, showcasing its serendipitous essence and cultural treasures anew with a captivating contemporary introduction and whimsical illustrations by author and artist David Coggins Paris in Winter strikes again with a brand new edition including new watercolor drawings with fanciful ink and charming vignettes featuring moments from Coggins’ family's annual New Year's sojourns to Paris, which, because of their unending love for the city, they've been taking together for almost 25 years. This memoir of poetic, lighthearted stories highlights the family's passion for art, food, fashion, and social life. Family rituals—from having lunch each January at the delightful Le Grand Vefour to haunting favorite antique shops and seeking out-of-the-ordinary spots, like a little known garden or a gypsy circus—are interspersed with serendipitous moments: hearing Bono sing "Happy Birthday" to a friend in a bistro, adopting an abandoned lap dog, and the simple pleasures of Parisian street life. Coggins's delicate and intimate drawings capture classic Parisian scenes as well as family and friends against the backdrop of the elegant City of Light under the cloak of winter. Across cafes and hotels, apartments and galleries, the family mixes with a lively group of Parisian and international actors, designers, writers, and students. Furthermore, Coggins weaves in fascinating bits of the city's history and artistic lore, from Victor Hugo's interior designs to the painting that legend has it started Impressionism, to delight Francophiles all over. The first edition of Paris in Winter was a Minneapolis Star Tribune top book in 2015 and has been featured in Condé Nast Traveler, Town and Country Magazine, Mpls/StPaul Magazine, and Twin Cities Public Television. With new charming watercolor illustrations featuring loungers gazing over a duck-filled pond and a woman strolling serenely across a bridge with a view of the Eiffel Tower beyond, this second edition book continues to capture the soul of the City of Love.




The Paris Winter


Book Description

“[With] murderous plots, shady Parisian undersides, upper-class dealings. . . . this novel is rich in historical detail and robust with personality.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review Maud Heighton came to Lafond’s famous Academie to paint, and to flee the constraints of her small English town. It took all her courage to escape, but Paris, she quickly realizes, is no place for a light purse. While her fellow students enjoy the dazzling decadence of the Belle Epoque, Maud slips into poverty. Quietly starving, and dreading another cold Paris winter, she stumbles upon an opportunity when Christian Morel engages her as a live-in companion to his beautiful young sister, Sylvie. Maud is overjoyed by her good fortune. With a clean room, hot meals, and an umbrella to keep her dry, she is able to hold her head high as she strolls the streets of Montmartre. No longer hostage to poverty and hunger, Maud can at last devote herself to her art. But all is not as it seems. Christian and Sylvie, Maud soon discovers, are not quite the darlings they pretend to be. Sylvie has a secret addiction to opium and Christian has an ominous air of intrigue. As this dark and powerful tale progresses, Maud is drawn further into the Morels’ world of elegant deception. Their secrets become hers, and soon she is caught in a scheme of betrayal and revenge that will plunge her into the darkness that waits beneath this glittering city of light. “Dramatic and teeming with intrigue, The Paris Winter is a richly detailed historical novel that both thrills and satisfies.” —Shelf Awareness




Paris in Love


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Wilde in Love, a joyful chronicle of a year in one of the most beautiful cities in the world: Paris. “What a beautiful and delightful tasting menu of a book: the kids, the plump little dog, the Italian husband. Reading this memoir was like wandering through a Parisian patisserie in a dream. I absolutely loved it.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love When bestselling romance author Eloisa James took a sabbatical from her day job as a Shakespeare professor, she also took a leap that many people dream about: She sold her house and moved her family to Paris. With no classes to teach, no committee meetings to attend, no lawn to mow or cars to park, Eloisa revels in the ordinary pleasures of life—discovering corner museums that tourists overlook, chronicling Frenchwomen’s sartorial triumphs, walking from one end of Paris to another. She copes with her Italian husband’s notions of quality time; her two hilarious children, ages eleven and fifteen, as they navigate schools—not to mention puberty—in a foreign language; and her mother-in-law Marina’s raised eyebrow in the kitchen (even as Marina overfeeds Milo, the family dog). Paris in Love invites the reader into the life of a New York Times bestselling author and her spirited, enchanting family, framed by la ville de l’amour. Praise for Paris in Love “Exhilarating and enchanting . . . brims with a casual wisdom about life.”—Chicago Tribune “In this delightful charm-bracelet of a memoir, [Eloisa James shares] her adventures as an American suddenly immersed in all things French—food, clothes, joie de vivre.”—People “Enchanting . . . gives the reader a sense of being immersed along with James in Paris for a year . . . you see the rain, taste the food, observe the people.”—USA Today “This delectable confection, which includes recipes, is more than a visit to a glorious city: it is also a tour of a family, a marriage, and a love that has no borders. Très magnifique!”—Library Journal (starred review) “A charming, funny and poignant memoir . . . steeped in Paris and suffused with love.”—Star Tribune “Charming . . . a romance—for a city, a life, a family, and love itself.”—The Huffington Post




After the Winter


Book Description

Claudio’s apartment faces a wall. Rising from bed, he sets his feet on the floor at the same time, to ground himself. Cecilia sits at her window, contemplating a cemetery, the radio her best companion. In parallel and entwining stories that move from Havana to Paris to New York City, no routine, no argument for the pleasures of solitude, can withstand our most human drive to find ourselves in another, and fall in love. And no depth of emotion can protect us from love’s inevitable loss.




Blue


Book Description

He gained instant fans around the world with tales of his family's many years visiting Paris in winter. Now David Coggins brings to curious, travel-loving readers the same degree of enviable stories and charming illustrations, this time from St. Barts--a perfect compliment to the first book in the series. Blue: A St. Barts Memoir by artist and writer David Coggins is an affectionate, poetic account of his family's annual visits to St. Barthelemy in the French West Indies. As in his popular Paris in Winter, the pages of Blue are full of lyrical writing and vivid watercolors and ink drawings. Coggins and his family have a passion for the simple yet sophisticated pleasures of life on the beautiful French island. That passion is contagious, and the reader is soon caught up in rituals developed and refined over 20 years. Much of it centers around the mountain villa where they stay and the timeless joys of the Caribbean: swimming, reading, sailing, meals overlooking the sea. Coggins describes the natural world lovingly, and captures it in his drawings--sublime sky and sea, lush tropical gardens, abundant wildlife from iguanas to whales. He writes about social life, about the famous and glamorous but more about people who live on the island, chefs, artists, wine sellers, sailors. Blue is a delight for the eye and the mind, an antidote to the pressures of urban life. It's a deeply personal telling of one family's experiences in an idyllic setting, but Coggins's gifts as storyteller and illustrator, conveyed with humanity and a love of life, make Blue universally enchanting.




My (Part-Time) Paris Life


Book Description

Poignant, touching, and lively, this memoir of a woman who loses her mother and creates a new life for herself in Paris will speak to anyone who has lost a parent or reinvented themselves. Lisa Anselmo wrapped her entire life around her mother, a strong woman who was a defining force in her daughter’s life—maybe too defining. When her mother dies from breast cancer, Lisa realizes she hadn’t built a life of her own, and struggles to find her purpose. Who is she without her mother—and her mother’s expectations? Desperate for answers, she reaches for a lifeline in the form of an apartment in Paris, refusing to play it safe for the first time. What starts out as a lurching act of survival sets Lisa on a course that reshapes her life in ways she never could have imagined. But how can you imagine a life bigger than anything you’ve ever known? In the vein of Eat, Pray, Love and Wild, My (Part-time) Paris Life a story is for anyone who’s ever felt lost or hopeless, but still holds out hope of something more. This candid memoir explores one woman’s search for peace and meaning, and how the ups and downs of expat life in Paris taught her to let go of fear, find self-worth, and create real, lasting happiness.




The Wolves of Paris


Book Description

A terrifying, suspenseful, and grim exploration of the circumstances under which animals become man-killers as told from the perspective of a huge and formidable wolf-dog. Based on true events in 18th century France.




Last Christmas in Paris


Book Description

An unforgettably romantic novel that spans four Christmases (1914-1918), Last Christmas in Paris explores the ruins of war, the strength of love, and the enduring hope of the Christmas season. New York Times bestselling author Hazel Gaynor has joined with Heather Webb to create this unforgettably romantic novel of the Great War. August 1914. England is at war. As Evie Elliott watches her brother, Will, and his best friend, Thomas Harding, depart for the front, she believes—as everyone does—that it will be over by Christmas, when the trio plan to celebrate the holiday among the romantic cafes of Paris. But as history tells us, it all happened so differently… Evie and Thomas experience a very different war. Frustrated by life as a privileged young lady, Evie longs to play a greater part in the conflict—but how?—and as Thomas struggles with the unimaginable realities of war he also faces personal battles back home where War Office regulations on press reporting cause trouble at his father’s newspaper business. Through their letters, Evie and Thomas share their greatest hopes and fears—and grow ever fonder from afar. Can love flourish amid the horror of the First World War, or will fate intervene? Christmas 1968. With failing health, Thomas returns to Paris—a cherished packet of letters in hand—determined to lay to rest the ghosts of his past. But one final letter is waiting for him…




The Florist's Daughter


Book Description

This New York Times Notable memoir of a middle-class, middle-America family is a “beautiful bouquet of a book” (Entertainment Weekly). They say “a daughter is a daughter all her life,” and no statement could be truer for Patricia Hampl. Born to a Czech father—an artistic florist—and a wary Irish mother, Hampl experienced a childhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, that couldn’t have been more normal, the perfect example of a twentieth century middle-class, middle-American upbringing. But as she faces the death of her mother, Hampl reflects on the struggles her parents went through to provide that normal, boring existence, and her own struggles with fulfilling the role of dutiful daughter as she grew through the postwar years to the turbulent sixties and couldn’t help wanting to rebel against the notion of a “relentlessly modest life.” Named a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, The Florist’s Daughter is Hampl’s most extraordinary work to date—a “quietly stunning” reminiscence of a Midwestern girlhood, and a reflection on what it means to be a daughter (People).




Leonardo


Book Description

"A considerable work of assimilative scholarship and common sense...races along merrily."—The Boston Globe A lively biography of the high genius of the renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci French writer Serge Bramly's classic work of biography portrays Leonard da Vinci as a genius torn by inner conflicts. Using contemporary sources including Leonardo's notebooks and annotated erotic drawings, he presents a complete portrait of the man as well as his genius.