Must-Read Historical Fiction Books Set in France

Elizabeth Chadwick’s medieval trilogy about Eleanor of Aquitaine — the enigmatic noble who reigned over France and England in two successive marriages — begins with The Summer Queen. Here, readers meet a teenage Eleanor, who will develop into a duchess, then a princess, then queen of France, all in the span of a single 12 months.

More than a decade after she emigrated to Paris along with her uncle Louis and cousin Theo, Pauline Deng could also be compelled to return to Shanghai for an organized marriage. She is aware of Theo can persuade his father to let her keep in France. Now, all she has to do is locate him. Her search takes her to Noyelles-sur-Mer, the place Theo has been working with the British Chinese Labour Corps in the midst of the Great War. Instead of her cousin, nevertheless, Pauline finds his French lover, Camille, who’s herself attempting to flee an abusive marriage. The fates of those two younger girls rapidly develop into intertwined as they work to find out their very own fates towards a wartime backdrop.

A famed soprano’s high-flying life in Paris throughout the Belle Époque takes heart stage in Alexander Chee’s second novel. Lilliet Berne’s life is crammed with sexual escapades, duels, music, homicide, style, and decadence. If you have been the child who watched Moulin Rouge! and dreamed of waking up in Satine and Christian’s world afterward, you’ll wish to dive into Lilliet’s story, posthaste.

Few girls and ladies all through historical past handle to captivate audiences the best way Joan of Arc has. Drawing comparisons to Wolf Hall, this novel recasts the Maid of Orléans as a secular determine — a daring, brawny younger girl who swears revenge towards the English in the wake of her sister’s demise. Joan follows its heroine for almost a decade, starting with a 10-year-old Joan rising up in Domrémy in 1422 and ending along with her 1431 demise in Rouen.

From the creator of Girl with a Pearl Earring and At the Edge of the Orchard comes The Lady and the Unicorn. Tracy Chevalier’s 2003 novel strikes between a big forged of characters to hint the (fictional) historical past of the six (actual) medieval tapestries hanging in a Paris museum. Chief amongst them is Nicolas des Innocents, the gifted artist and incorrigible cad employed to design the artworks, whose job turns into horribly sophisticated by his interpersonal relationships along with his patron’s spouse and daughter.

In pre-revolutionary France, 15-year-old Gabrielle de Montserrat desires of marrying her old flame: a rustic physician named Pierre-André Coffinhal. Unfortunately, Coffinhal isn’t rich sufficient to win the approval of Gabrielle’s brother, a marquis, who marries her off to an abusive baron as an alternative. Within a couple of years, Gabrielle’s husband is lifeless, leaving her to lift their younger daughter alone. Securing a place because the mistress of a rich depend seems at first to be a stroke of excellent luck. But Gabrielle’s proximity to inherited wealth and energy will quickly threaten her very life because the Revolution kicks into excessive gear…and the sort physician she as soon as cherished holds her destiny in his arms.

David Diop’s multi-award-winning novel follows Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese man damaged by his experiences preventing for France in World War I. Unable to hold out a mercy killing that might have spared his good friend from a drawn-out demise, he seeks atonement by ritually slaughtering German troopers each evening. As Alfa amasses a group of warfare trophies — the severed arms of the lads he kills — his comrades-in-arms start to suspect one thing much more sinister than a soldier’s knack for warfare is accountable for his work.

Moving between the Nineteen Fifties and 2010s, Passing Love interweaves the tales of Nicole and Ruby: two Black Americans who got here to the City of Light some 60 years aside, every one chasing a deep eager for one thing extra. But one thing mysterious connects these two, and Nicole’s probability discovery of {a photograph} of her father units her on a collision course with the previous.

Another dual-timeline novel, Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues follows Chip and Sid, the previous drummer and bass participant for a German American jazz band, as they return to Berlin, 50 years after their ensemble disbanded. In 1940, the Hot-Time Swingers misplaced their pianist to the Gestapo and moved on to Paris to chop a document on the eve of German occupation. There, the trumpeter, a 20-year-old Black German named Hiero, was arrested. Now, visiting Berlin for a competition held in Hiero’s honor, narrator Sid types by his sophisticated emotions about his outdated compatriot — and learns what actually brought on the Swingers’ downfall.

Pursued relentlessly by the press at Cannes, famed actress Grace Kelly retreats to a humble fragrance boutique, the place owner-operator Sophie Duval provides her a level of shelter and anonymity. As Sophie protects Grace from the prying digital camera lens of 1 James Henderson, a British photographer, she kinds an everlasting friendship with the American. A 12 months later, Sophie accompanies Grace as she prepares to marry Rainier III — and reunites with James in the pre-wedding fervor.

Based on the real-life story of Pedro Gonzalez, Marvelous follows two younger individuals, Pedro and Catherine, as they’re thrust collectively on the whims of the French queen, Catherine de’ Medici. Captured by a slave dealer in his native Tenerife, Pedro has grown up as a curiosity in the French courtroom, the place he’s been dubbed “Monsieur Sauvage.” When 17-year-old Catherine Raffelin’s father trades her hand in marriage for the alleviation of his money owed, the woman finds herself forcibly wed to Pedro, with whom she should now navigate the online of intrigue in King Henri II’s courtroom.

Born in St. Louis in 1906 and married twice by age 15, Josephine Baker emigrated to France in the Twenties. There, the 19-year-old rapidly grew to become a cabaret sensation. By the time World War II rolled round, she had leveraged her fame in service to the French, conducting espionage as she mingled with high-ranking males among the many Axis Powers. The first Black girl to be honored in Paris’s Panthéon, Baker lived nothing if not an eventful life — one which kinds the idea of Sherry Jones’s historic novel.

At the shut of the seventeenth century, the growing older Louis XIV despatched his favourite explorer, Father Yves de la Croix, to seize a sea monster in a bid to realize immortality. Yves returns with a feminine specimen, who’s swiftly dubbed Sherzad and placed on show at Versailles. Studying Sherzad in the weeks main as much as her deliberate slaughter, Yves is aided by his sister, Marie-Josèphe, who seems to be the one individual able to understanding the ocean girl’s language — and recognizing her intelligence.

Unlike the remainder of the must-read historic fiction books set in France I’ve gathered right here, that is technically a posthumously revealed contemporaneous novel. Born right into a Jewish household in Kiev, Irène Némirovsky was denied French citizenship in the late Nineteen Thirties regardless of having lived in the nation since her teenage years. In 1942, whereas engaged on what she deliberate to be a five-part novel, Némirovsky was arrested in Vichy, France, and despatched to Auschwitz, the place she died precisely one month later. Her husband would even be murdered at Auschwitz that 12 months. Discovered by her daughter in the Nineties, Suite Française includes the primary two elements of Némirovsky’s closing writing mission and depicts German-occupied France by modern eyes.

The daughter of a papermaker in 14th-century France, Auda’s albinism impressed a superstitious healer to amputate her tongue to stop her from preaching the sermons of devils. As the Inquisition marches nearer and nearer to their dwelling in the countryside, Auda resists her older sister’s makes an attempt at an organized marriage, as an alternative selecting to take a job as a noblewoman’s scribe — and shortly finds herself in grave hazard.

The daughter of a white plantation proprietor and an enslaved girl flees to France throughout the Haitian Revolution, solely to seek out herself going through one other rebellion on the far aspect of the Atlantic. Tangled up in extra methods than one with Robespierre and his lover, Cornélie, Sylvie should resolve the place her politics — and her morals — lie, in Mademoiselle Revolution.

Véronique was compelled to depart the School of Mirrors — the coaching floor for the younger courtesans in King Louis XV’s harem — when she found the true identification of the “Polish count” who impregnated her. Married off to a service provider following her daughter’s start, Véronique has by no means identified Marie-Louise, who grew up in a collection of foster properties. Based on a fable about Madame de Pompadour’s sordid function in the French courtroom, The School of Mirrors follows these two girls as they grapple with the approaching revolution in the wake of the king’s demise.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas employed a Vietnamese cook dinner whereas they lived at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris — an individual talked about briefly in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. Here, Monique Truong imagines the cook dinner’s life contained in the Stein-Toklas family. The Book of Salt opens in 1934, when Binh’s “Mesdames” are making ready to return to the U.S., leaving him to resolve the place he needs to reside out the remainder of his days.

In the late 1340s, because the Black Death raged throughout Europe, European cities started finishing up brutal pogroms, torturing and executing Jewish residents en masse as punishment for allegedly inflicting the plague. In February 1349, the non-Jews of Strasbourg publicly massacred the town’s Jewish inhabitants over the course of six days. Set in the months main as much as the bloodbath, Eva Wiseman’s Another Me follows Natan, a Jewish teenager, who unwittingly discovers a plot to border his group for homicide — and should discover a technique to converse out earlier than it’s too late.