Our six families are the Le Sourds, the de Cygnes, the Renards, the Blanchards, the Gascons, and the Jacobs. (And it was long enough as it is!) So the earliest appearance of the book's six families is the 12th century. Rutherfurd evidently wanted to keep this novel about France and the French. Unlike Sarum, which went all the way back to the city's paleolithic ancestors, Paris doesn't even go back to the town's Roman settlement. We start in La Belle Époque of the Third Republic, with the Gascon brothers, then he skips back and forth, from the 12th to the 16th to the 20th century, back to the medieval era, and continuing to move back and forth until the storyline reaches the interwar period and stays there, where we'll meet the Gascons again during the Nazi occupation. With Paris, he varied from the linear timeline a bit. I find his formula very satisfying and entertaining, even if it is very much family melodrama wrapped in historical trivia.
More richly detailed, more thrilling, and more romantic then anything Rutherfurd has written before, Paris: The Novel wonderfully illuminates hundreds of years in the City of Light and Love and brings the sights, scents, and tastes of Paris to sumptuous life.Įdward Rutherfurd has a formula: take an ancient city, put a few families in it, and follow their triumphs and tragedies across the centuries, using each family as a recurring archetype for the multiple generations of characters that reappear. With his unrivaled blend of impeccable research and narrative verve, Rutherfurd weaves an extraordinary narrative tapestry that captures all the glory of Paris. Moving back and forth in time across centuries, the story unfolds through intimate and vivid tales of self-discovery, divided loyalties, passion, and long-kept secrets of characters both fictional and real, all set against the backdrop of the glorious city - from the building of Notre Dame to the dangerous machinations of Cardinal Richlieu from the glittering court of Versailles to the violence of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune from the hedonism of the Belle Époque, the heyday of the impressionists, to the tragedy of the First World War from the 1920s when the writers of the Lost Generation could be found drinking at Les Deux Magots to the Nazi occupation, the heroic efforts of the French Resistance, and the 1968 student revolt. In this breathtaking saga of love, war, art, and intrigue, Rutherfurd has set his sights on the most magnificent city in the world: Paris. Internationally best-selling author Edward Rutherfurd has enchanted millions of readers with his sweeping, multigenerational dramas that illuminate the great achievements and travails throughout history.
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