100 books like Ma Vie à Paris

By Astier de Villate,

Here are 100 books that Ma Vie à Paris fans have personally recommended if you like Ma Vie à Paris. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Life in Paris: Paris Fashion Weeks photographed by Meyabe

Kate van den Boogert Author Of The Paris Flea Market: Les Puces de Paris, Saint-Ouen

From my list on connecting with a few true Paris ‘Makers’.

Why am I passionate about this?

I love Paris. This city endlessly stimulates both my head and my heart. Always in movement, everchanging, it, like all cities, is a living organism, manifesting the spirit of all those who live here, past and present. Through a bunch of different projects and a handful of books, I’ve been trying to map its creative DNA, seeking out and championing the people and places who contribute to forging Paris’s own distinctive identity today. Makers Paris (Prestel) and Makers Paris 2 (Ofr. Éditions) evolved out of more than a decade running slow-travel pioneer Gogo City Guides, and my latest book The Paris Flea Market (Prestel) is a new stop on this journey.

Kate's book list on connecting with a few true Paris ‘Makers’

Kate van den Boogert Why did Kate love this book?

As the much-missed Karl Lagerfeld once said, “Fashion is a train that waits for nobody.” And that train comes whooshing through Paris quite a lot.

This book captures some of the inimitable energy and agitation of Paris Fashion Week, as self-taught photographer Meyabe covers six seasons—men’s, women’s, and couture—over a single year. It includes an introduction by local fashion hero Loïc Prigent and is published by my friends Alex and Marie from Ofr. (who also published Makers Paris #2).

Ofr. is an indie arts bookshop, gallery and publisher, always in the moment, that channels a certain bohemian spirit proper to Paris: “Open, Free and Ready”.

By Meyabe (photographer),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Life in Paris as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


Book cover of Paris in Our View: Poems Selected by Shakespeare and Company

Kate van den Boogert Author Of The Paris Flea Market: Les Puces de Paris, Saint-Ouen

From my list on connecting with a few true Paris ‘Makers’.

Why am I passionate about this?

I love Paris. This city endlessly stimulates both my head and my heart. Always in movement, everchanging, it, like all cities, is a living organism, manifesting the spirit of all those who live here, past and present. Through a bunch of different projects and a handful of books, I’ve been trying to map its creative DNA, seeking out and championing the people and places who contribute to forging Paris’s own distinctive identity today. Makers Paris (Prestel) and Makers Paris 2 (Ofr. Éditions) evolved out of more than a decade running slow-travel pioneer Gogo City Guides, and my latest book The Paris Flea Market (Prestel) is a new stop on this journey.

Kate's book list on connecting with a few true Paris ‘Makers’

Kate van den Boogert Why did Kate love this book?

The much-loved English bookshop Shakespeare and Company can at times feel like a victim of its own success (every so often I try and imagine solutions as if I were trying to save Venice!), but the place remains a refuge for writers and readers and a true beacon of bohemian values.

In my first Makers book, owner Sylvia remembers her father George describing Paris: “where poetry is part of life; where men are poets and life is a poem.” And now the bookshop has published its own collection of poems about Paris, illustrated with beautiful line drawings by the Italian illustrator Matteo Pericoli.

Alongside verses by Rimbaud, Gregory Corso, or Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pericoli imagines the views from windows of poets who, at one time or another, made their homes here, like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas or Charles Baudelaire, or indeed Shakespeare and Company’s own beautiful view across the…

By David Delannet, Krista Halverson, Matteo Pericoli

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Paris in Our View as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


Book cover of Two Dozen Eggs

Kate van den Boogert Author Of The Paris Flea Market: Les Puces de Paris, Saint-Ouen

From my list on connecting with a few true Paris ‘Makers’.

Why am I passionate about this?

I love Paris. This city endlessly stimulates both my head and my heart. Always in movement, everchanging, it, like all cities, is a living organism, manifesting the spirit of all those who live here, past and present. Through a bunch of different projects and a handful of books, I’ve been trying to map its creative DNA, seeking out and championing the people and places who contribute to forging Paris’s own distinctive identity today. Makers Paris (Prestel) and Makers Paris 2 (Ofr. Éditions) evolved out of more than a decade running slow-travel pioneer Gogo City Guides, and my latest book The Paris Flea Market (Prestel) is a new stop on this journey.

Kate's book list on connecting with a few true Paris ‘Makers’

Kate van den Boogert Why did Kate love this book?

Paris has an incredibly vibrant food scene, and some of that energy is generated by a shapeshifting community of expat chefs and foodies. Hugh Corcoran, a Belfast born writer and cook, spent the most part of the last decade living and working in France, in Paris and beyond.

This lovely book is a collection of vignettes from his travels, simply and honestly written, remembering people he met along the way and the meals they shared. Each story ends with a recipe, including some French classics like roast chicken, gratin dauphinois, or carottes râpées.

If the book’s tone is gentle, it’s actually an urgent call to action, as the epigraph confirms: “Friends and neighbors, wet your mouths, for after death you won’t touch another drop.”

By Hugh Corcoran,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Two Dozen Eggs as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Two Dozen Eggs by Hugh Corcoran is a pocketbook collection of short stories and recipes.

Hugh Corcoran is a cook from Belfast who has spent the most part of the last decade living and working in the Basque Country and France.

This book contains a collection of short stories written over the period of a few months but based on the memories and experiences of those places and his childhood in Ireland.

Two Dozen Eggs features an introduction by Rachel Roddy and is illustrated by Peter Doyle.


Book cover of French Moderne: Cocktails from the Twenties and Thirties with Recipes

Kate van den Boogert Author Of The Paris Flea Market: Les Puces de Paris, Saint-Ouen

From my list on connecting with a few true Paris ‘Makers’.

Why am I passionate about this?

I love Paris. This city endlessly stimulates both my head and my heart. Always in movement, everchanging, it, like all cities, is a living organism, manifesting the spirit of all those who live here, past and present. Through a bunch of different projects and a handful of books, I’ve been trying to map its creative DNA, seeking out and championing the people and places who contribute to forging Paris’s own distinctive identity today. Makers Paris (Prestel) and Makers Paris 2 (Ofr. Éditions) evolved out of more than a decade running slow-travel pioneer Gogo City Guides, and my latest book The Paris Flea Market (Prestel) is a new stop on this journey.

Kate's book list on connecting with a few true Paris ‘Makers’

Kate van den Boogert Why did Kate love this book?

This fascinating book plunges the reader into the avant-garde effervescence of the Roaring Twenties in Paris, presenting serious historical scholarship about the era alongside the author’s own take on classic cocktails like the Sazerac or the Highball. It provides, to quote the author Franck Audoux (in my book Makers Paris), “a kind of cultural snapshot of an era, to show how the cocktail, like jazz or the Charleston, participated in the reconstruction of a new society after the carnage of the First World War”.

One of the founders of the game-changing restaurant Le Châteaubriand, Franck is a pillar of the indie food and drinks scene here. This book is the fertile soil from which his current project, Cravan, grows. Named after Oscar Wilde’s nephew, the poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, Cravan is a contemporary cocktail bar rooted in the “French Modern.” 

By Franck Audoux,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked French Moderne as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Following Prohibition, Paris, much like London, became known for serving up original and innovative mixed drinks. Although cocktails were present in the late nineteenth century, it was the interwar period, and particularly les annees folles that transformed the culture of the cocktail consumption. This fertile time, both intellectually and artistically, was nourished by a growing influx of expatriates from across the Atlantic who made way for an age of experimentation and creation. The new ambassadors of cocktails made alcohols and aperitifs that were specifically French stars of the show. Alongside classic French Vermouth, locally produced spirits including Byrrh, Dubonnet, Suze,…


Book cover of Maigret and the Bum

Stephen Holgate Author Of To Live and Die in the Floating World

From my list on neglected mysteries.

Why am I passionate about this?

From Poe to Conan Doyle and Christie to the hard-boiled school of Hammett and Chandler and modern practitioners such as Louise Penny and Walter Mosely, I can gobble up mysteries like candy. Their appeal lies not only in compelling storylines but in their promise to restore order to our chaotic world, assure us that justice will triumph and evil geniuses will lose to intrepid paladins. As with wines, art, and sex, tastes vary. While reading various lists of great mysteries to jog my memory to make this list, I realized that few of my favorites were even listed, much less among the top ranks. Like a good detective, I’m determined that justice prevails.

Stephen's book list on neglected mysteries

Stephen Holgate Why did Stephen love this book?

Like so many, I’m addicted to this series. Often imitated, never surpassed, Simenon is perhaps the only mystery writer to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was considered by some contemporaries to be the greatest French novelist of his time. Don’t let that put you off. These are great mysteries with an indelible sense of time and place. If the Sherlock Holmes stories can transport me to Victorian London, I can as easily take an absorbing mid-20th century trip to the underside of Paris with Inspector Jules Maigret.

These police procedurals offer unforgettable characters and deep psychological insight. Maigret and the Bum is perhaps my favorite. The bum of the title is a vagrant who has been beaten nearly to death on the banks of the Seine. As Maigret investigates the crime, he finds that the victim was once a highly respected doctor, dedicated to helping the…

By Georges Simenon,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Maigret and the Bum as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Book by Simenon, Georges


Book cover of Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner

Holly A. Baggett Author Of Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the "Little Review"

From my list on how lesbians in history had fun in spite of everything.

Why am I passionate about this?

Growing up in a small town and realizing I was gay, I saw nothing but dread ahead of me. In graduate school, I came across a one-sentence description of Margaret Anderson as a “lesbian anarchist.” I knew I was home. My book is the first full-length biography of Anderson and her partner, Jane Heap. They went through a lot of crap–they were tried for publishing Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses–but above all, they were witty rebels, strong women, and proud and out. 

Holly's book list on how lesbians in history had fun in spite of everything

Holly A. Baggett Why did Holly love this book?

This biography gives you the inside experience of one of the most visible lesbians in Paris during the mid-twentieth century.

Genet was the pseudonym for Janet Flanner, The New Yorker’s correspondent for France. Flanner knew and wrote about everyone. Her column noting Anderson’s death is particularly touching. From Indiana to the City of Lights in one lifetime.

By Brenda Wineapple,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Genet as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The daughter of an Indianapolis mortician, Janet Flanner really began to live at the age of thirty, when she fled to Paris with her female lover. That was in 1921, a few years before she signed on as Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, taking the pseudonym Genet. For half a century she described life on the Continent with matchless elegance.


Book cover of The Kill

Mary Soderstrom Author Of Concrete: From Ancient Origins to a Problematic Future

From my list on to design a workable, walkable, wonderful city.

Why am I passionate about this?

I like to say I'm a born-again pedestrian. After a childhood in car-friendly Southern California, I moved first to the San Francisco Bay Area and then to Montreal. There I discovered the pleasures of living in walkable cities, and over the years I've explored them in a series of books about people, nature, and urban spaces in which the problems of spread-out, concrete-heavy cities take a front-row seat. The impact of the way we've built our cities over the last 100 years is becoming apparent, as carbon dioxide rises, driving climate changes. We must change the way we live, and the books I suggest give some insights about what to do and what not to do.

Mary's book list on to design a workable, walkable, wonderful city

Mary Soderstrom Why did Mary love this book?

Sometimes it's helpful, even encouraging, to discover that problems we face today were faced by people in the past.  Emile Zola wrote a series of novels about Paris in the mid-19th century at a time when the City of Light was being rebuilt along pretty extraordinary lines. At the same time that poor people were being tossed out of their substandard housing, some people were making fortunes speculating in real estate. The Kill focuses on the personal dramas of people on both sides of the equation, with quite a lot of sex thrown in to spice things up.

By Émile Zola, Brian Nelson (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Kill as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'It was the time when the rush for spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.'

The Kill (La Curee) is the second volume in Zola's great cycle of twenty novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, and the first to establish Paris - the capital of modernity - as the centre of Zola's narrative world. Conceived as a representation of…


Book cover of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Mark Rowlands Author Of Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death, and Happiness

From my list on humans and other animals.

Why am I passionate about this?

The most important formative experiences of my life were contained in the years I spent living and traveling with Brenin, a wolfdog. I can safely say that just about every worthwhile idea I have had – I am a professor of philosophy and ideas are supposed to be my thing – stemmed from those years. I have written many books since Brenin died, all of them, in one way or another, concerned with the question of what it is to be human. I am convinced that we can only understand this if we begin with the idea that we are animals and work from there.

Mark's book list on humans and other animals

Mark Rowlands Why did Mark love this book?

Commonly thought to be about death, and our fear thereof, what I find most striking about this book is its piercing and utterly haunting analysis of the role of memories in making us who we are. The most important memories are the ones that are lost, and then return in a new form, deeply woven into our bodies, emotions, and feelings – as blood, as glance and gesture, as Rilke puts it. Rilke was a poet; this was his only excursion into the art form of the novel. So, the book falls apart after a while. But if anyone has written anything better than the first fifty pages or so, I am unacquainted with it.

By Rainer Maria Rilke, Burton Pike (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

First published in 1910, Rilke's "Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" is one the first great modernist novels, the account of poet-aspirant Brigge in his exploration of poetic individuality and his reflections on the experience of time as death approaches. This new translation by Burton Pike is a reaction to overly stylized previous translations, and aims to capture not only the beauty but also the strangeness, the spirit, of Rilke's German.


Book cover of The Gospel of Blood: The crimes and trial of the Vampire of Paris in his own words

Sondra London Author Of The Making of a Serial Killer

From my list on recent true crime books.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a  true-crime author. Most recently, I have released a pair of related books: The Making of a Serial Killer: 2d Ed, by Danny Rolling as told to myself; and Danny Rolling Serial Killer: Interviews. Before that, I published Good Little Soldiers: A Memoir of True Horror. Coauthored with Dianne Fitzpatrick, it relates her tale of murder & mind control under the US Army MK Ultra program. Earlier, I wrote True Vampires, an encyclopedic compendium of bloody crimes, and Knockin' on Joe: Voices from Death Row. I also collaborated with serial killer GJ Schaefer on Killer Fiction, a volume of psychopathic musings he wrote for me.

Sondra's book list on recent true crime books

Sondra London Why did Sondra love this book?

At long last the Vampire of Paris crawls from his crypt, a living legend emblazoned with magical sigils and muttering dire imprecations for 666 searing pages. A world-renowned artist and bold aesthete of the macabre, Nico Claux holds a Japanese cannibal as his role model and calls Satan his homeboy. This reclusive genius goes beyond the pale only to reveal himself as a regular bloke, albeit one with a taste for torture and blasphemy. Meant to be read in the darkest night!

By Nico Claux,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Gospel of Blood as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Gospel of Blood is the autobiography of Nico Claux, a French morgue attendant whose morbid obsessions led him to grave robbery, cannibalism and murder in the early 1990s. It is a bone-chilling chronicle of a real-life vampire who prowled the Gothic cemeteries of Paris, unearthing coffins and mutilating the bodies inside. A practicing Satanist, Claux escalated to murder after working for a year in several morgues, receiving orders to kill from the corpses he had autopsied.The Gospel of Blood provides a rare insight into a killer’s tortured mind, as he relates the graphic details of his crimes, including never-before…


Book cover of An Island Princess Starts a Scandal

Ali Rosen Author Of Recipe for Second Chances

From my list on romances with complicated heroines.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a contemporary romance author who loves to feature my own messy heroines – mostly because they are the type of women I read! So my favorite books often feature women who are complex and even stereotypically unlikeable. I love seeing my expectations subverted and a more winding, emotional way to a happy ending. 

Ali's book list on romances with complicated heroines

Ali Rosen Why did Ali love this book?

This is historical for people who usually roll their eyes at unrealistic regency historicals.

Our firecracker Manuela wants a debauched summer before she gets married off, and Duchess Cora is who she wants. But besides the sumptuous 1889 Paris setting we get a beautiful love story that fits in its time but also eschews it. I love this whole series and can’t wait for the next one.  

By Adriana Herrera,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked An Island Princess Starts a Scandal as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"Adriana Herrera is once again here to upend any outdated notions of historical romance." —Entertainment Weekly

"Adriana Herrera is a fun, frothy, feminist voice in historical romance." —New York Times bestselling author Sarah MacLean

One last summer. 

For Manuela del Carmen Caceres Galvan, the invitation to show her paintings at the 1889 Exposition Universelle came at the perfect time. Soon to be trapped in a loveless marriage, Manuela has given herself one last summer of freedom—in Paris, with her two best friends. 

One scandalous encounter. 

Cora Kempf Bristol, Duchess of Sundridge, is known for her ruthlessness in business. It's not…


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