Haunting Paris

Chaudry’s debut is a heart-wrenching love letter to Paris masked as a wartime tragedy. Told from several perspectives, one of which is a ghost, the story is handed from Sylvie, a piano teacher in 1989 reeling from the death of her psychoanalyst husband, Julien; eventually to Julien himself, hovering in the ether as a saccharine-voiced revenant. In the bicentennial year of the French Revolution, a grieving Sylvie finds a folder that leads her on a search for information about members of Julien’s family who were arrested in the tragic Vel d’Hiv Roundup in 1942, when 13,000 Parisian Jews were rounded up in a single night, many of them children. With empathy that Julien’s ghost admits he lacked, Sylvie sets out to discover if her husband’s niece may have survived, and in doing so begins to heal her own broken spirit. Julien is more than omniscient as he cedes the story to various historical figures, including those who witnessed that tragic night when his sister and her twins are taken. But every page about these Parisians and their fair city is so fraught with emotion that eventually they lose their impact. Readers who adore Paris and war stories may nevertheless forgive this very fine writer for not showing more restraint. (June)