“A modern-day story of love, music, and death, with echoes of the Nazi retreat in World War II France…A masterpiece filled with compassion and humanity. Perfect for the pure pleasure of reading.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Description
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin reveals a powerful, rapturous novel set in a present-day Paris caught between violent unrest and its well-known, inescapable glories.
Seventy-four-year-old Jules Lacour―a maître at Paris-Sorbonne, cellist, widower, veteran of the war in Algeria, and child of the Holocaust―must find a balance between his strong obligations to the past and the attractions and beauties of life and love in the present.
In the midst of what should be an effulgent time of life with its days bright with music, family, and rowing on the Seine, Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges to his principles, livelihood, and home, forcing him to grapple with his complex past and find a way forward. He risks fraud to save his terminally ill infant grandson, matches wits with a renegade insurance investigator, is drawn into an act of savage violence, and falls deeply, excitingly in love with a young cellist who is a third his age. Against the backdrop of an exquisite and knowing vision of Paris and the way it can uniquely shape a life, he forges a denouement that is staggering in its humanity, elegance, and truth.
In the intoxicating beauty of its prose and emotional amplitude of its storytelling, Mark Helprin’s Paris in the Present Tense is a soaring achievement, a deep, dizzying look at a life through the purifying lenses of art and memory.
Praise
“A modern-day story of love, music, and death, with echoes of the Nazi retreat in World War II France…A masterpiece filled with compassion and humanity. Perfect for the pure pleasure of reading.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“It is the fluidity of Helprin’s prose that makes this novel of ideas so utterly captivating.” Booklist (starred review)
“[Mark Helprin’s] books are romances in the chivalric mold, in which beauty, love, and bravery possess a greater reality than the characters dedicated to honoring them. This is true again in his enchanting new novel, Paris in the Present Tense…This passionate and uplifting book produces a kind of music that few living writers know how to create.” Wall Street Journal
“A twilight novel, and its love affair, essential to any Helprin work, is a complex one, haunted by time…His prose has an aching beauty.” Boston Globe
“Rooted in history and ethical debate.” Library Journal
Details
| Language | English |
|---|---|
| Release Day | Oct 2, 2017 |
| Release Date | October 3, 2017 |
| Release Date Machine | 1506988800 |
| Imprint | Blackstone Publishing |
| Provider | Blackstone Publishing |
| Categories | Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Literary Fiction, Fiction - All, Fiction - Adult |
Author Bio
Mark Helprin is the internationally acclaimed author of numerous works, including the New York Times bestsellers Winter’s Tale, In Sunlight and in Shadow, and Swan Lake.
Narrator Bio
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
Overview
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin reveals a powerful, rapturous novel set in a present-day Paris caught between violent unrest and its well-known, inescapable glories.
Seventy-four-year-old Jules Lacour―a maître at Paris-Sorbonne, cellist, widower, veteran of the war in Algeria, and child of the Holocaust―must find a balance between his strong obligations to the past and the attractions and beauties of life and love in the present.
In the midst of what should be an effulgent time of life with its days bright with music, family, and rowing on the Seine, Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges to his principles, livelihood, and home, forcing him to grapple with his complex past and find a way forward. He risks fraud to save his terminally ill infant grandson, matches wits with a renegade insurance investigator, is drawn into an act of savage violence, and falls deeply, excitingly in love with a young cellist who is a third his age. Against the backdrop of an exquisite and knowing vision of Paris and the way it can uniquely shape a life, he forges a denouement that is staggering in its humanity, elegance, and truth.
In the intoxicating beauty of its prose and emotional amplitude of its storytelling, Mark Helprin’s Paris in the Present Tense is a soaring achievement, a deep, dizzying look at a life through the purifying lenses of art and memory.
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