Here are 78 books that The Little Paris Bookshop fans have personally recommended if you like
The Little Paris Bookshop.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
My reading is almost entirely influenced by my own family’s extraordinary history. My mother and father-in-law were both illegitimate. Both suffered for the fact and my father-in-law was 11 years old when he first found out and was reunited with his mother, albeit on a second-class basis compared to his half siblings. My mother trained bomb aimers. My father flew Lancaster bombers and was just 19 years old in the skies above wartime Berlin. My own books combine history, my personal experiences, and my family’s past to weave wartime stories exploring the strains that those conflicts imposed on friendships.
An abiding theme within my own book is that love and friendship can supplant racial and cultural differences, and this book, set in a village in France during the 2nd World War, highlights a growing and reluctant friendship between an occupier and the occupied.
The hatred that invasion induces causes any fraternisation to be labelled ‘collaboration.’ Sometimes it is. Sometimes, it is just people caught out of context seeking comfort and normality.
It is easy for those whose countries have never been occupied to scoff at the behaviour of those who had to live in the atmosphere and the reality of a hostile invasion. Let’s hope we never have to find out firsthand.
In 1941, Irene Nemirovsky sat down to write a book that would convey the magnitude of what she was living through, not in terms of battles and politicians, but by evoking the domestic lives and personal trials of the ordinary citizens of France. She did not live to see her ambition fulfilled, or to know that sixty-five years later, "Suite Francaise" would be published for the first time, and hailed as a masterpiece. Set during a year that begins with France's fall to the Nazis in June 1940 and ends with Germany turning its attention to Russia, "Suite Francaise" falls…
I went to Paris the first time when I was nineteen. I was sitting in a cheap restaurant when a man entered carrying a burlap sack filled with escargots, and put some on my plate (all very unsanitary) for me to taste. Delicious! I was in France in the 1970s when Robert Parker was discovering French wine. (We didn’t meet then, but did after my series was published many years later.) Subsequent stays in Paris and other areas of France (Champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy) afforded me a food and wine sensibility that over decades has permeated my lifestyle, my friendships—and my writing.
I bought the paperback in 2010, and as I return to it, see where I underlined phrases and lines, especially about food and wine. I was enamored of the bachelor Bruno, and the small village he was a part of. That title was followed by The Dark Vineyard the following year, and that was when I declared myself a fan of Martin’s entertaining series. Martin interlaces serious issues with humor, just enough romance, and marvelous descriptions of food and wine. He was kind enough to endorse my series, and also sent me a recipe for lamb shanks that I cook once a year. (Midway through the series Martin and his wife wrote a cookbook that won awards in Germany, but alas, has still not been translated into English.)
The first Dordogne Mystery starring Bruno, Chief of Police, France's favourite cop. EU inspectors are causing havoc in the little town of St Denis and local tempers are running high, but is it really cause for murder?
Market day in the ancient town of St Denis in south-west France. EU hygiene inspectors have been swooping on France's markets, while the locals hide contraband cheese in their houses and call the Brussels bureaucrats 'Gestapo'. Local police chief Bruno supports their resistance. Although, here in what was once Vichy France, words like 'Gestapo' and 'resistance' still carry a profound resonance.
I went to Paris the first time when I was nineteen. I was sitting in a cheap restaurant when a man entered carrying a burlap sack filled with escargots, and put some on my plate (all very unsanitary) for me to taste. Delicious! I was in France in the 1970s when Robert Parker was discovering French wine. (We didn’t meet then, but did after my series was published many years later.) Subsequent stays in Paris and other areas of France (Champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy) afforded me a food and wine sensibility that over decades has permeated my lifestyle, my friendships—and my writing.
The description above segues nicely into The New Paris by Lindsey Traumata, published in 2017. Traumata now has a second book published, and hosts a podcast, and is popular on social media. I have spent at least a month (and sometimes three) in Paris annually over the past six years and think of Traumata’s first book as a good friend. She writes wonderful profiles of people, and she keeps readers updated about bistros, winemakers, new cuisine. Her writing is elegant, and I read her descriptions as avidly as I do a novel, constantly making notes. So different from the usual guidebooks.
The city long-adored for its medieval beauty, old-timey brasseries, and corner cafes has even more to offer today. In the last few years, a flood of new ideas and creative locals has infused a once-static, traditional city with a new open-minded sensibility and energy. Journalist Lindsey Tramuta offers detailed insight into the rapidly evolving worlds of food, wine, pastry, coffee, beer, fashion, and design in the delightful city of Paris. Tramuta puts the spotlight on the new trends and people that are making France's capital a more whimsical, creative, vibrant, and curious place to explore than its classical reputation might…
Annemarie Rawson is a Francophile who lived and worked in France for several years with her husband, Steve, and has traveled to France many times. She loves the cities for the culture, history, and architecture but her heart is in the countryside where beauty is all around and where she met the genuine warmth and generosity of many who have little to give.
If you like to cook and love France this book with its wonderful photography is also a coffee table book. Just looking through it will transport you to the French countryside where I lived and worked and adore. The recipes are not convoluted and are simple and delicious.
With beguiling recipes and sumptuous photography, A Kitchen in France transports you to the French countryside and marks the debut of a captivating new voice in cooking.
"This is real food: delicious, honest recipes that celebrate the beauty of picking what is ripe and in season, and capture the essence of life in rural France." —Alice Waters
When Mimi Thorisson and her family moved from Paris to a small town in out-of-the-way Médoc, she did not quite know what was in store for them. She found wonderful ingredients—from local farmers and the neighboring woods—and, most important, time to cook. Her…
I find myself drawn to stories about second chances and starting over because I find that, as a reader, I feel empowered whenever a character I have come to care about rises above their circumstances. I've always been drawn to characters who overcome, who find their own way in difficult times, and who do so with honor and integrity, especially when faced with adversaries who may be bigoted, self-absorbed, or even dangerous. I am drawn more to historical or exotic settings or even quirky everyday places, but I love writers who create almost an additional character with their sense of setting, giving it its own personality.
This book is a beautiful tale that demonstrates the ugliness of first impressions when it comes to viewing others. When Vivienne is looked down upon by the local mayor for being a single mother and nomadic traveler, he is making assumptions based on his own narrow-minded authority.
I love how, despite his attempts to harm her financially, she continues to show how being an individual who is true to oneself means more than trying to fit the mold of what someone else might think you should be.
Even before it was adapted into the Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, Chocolat entranced readers with its mix of hedonism, whimsy, and, of course, chocolate.
In tiny Lansquenet, where nothing much has changed in a hundred years, beautiful newcomer Vianne Rocher and her exquisite chocolate shop arrive and instantly begin to play havoc with Lenten vows.
Each box of luscious bonbons comes with a free gift: Vianne's uncanny perception of its buyer's private discontents and a clever, caring cure for them. Is she a witch?
Soon the parish no longer cares, as it abandons itself to temptation,…
I was a foreign correspondent seven time zones from home when my father died of a sudden heart attack. My grief mixed with guilt for never having sat down with him to unravel his vague vignettes about life and loss in the Holocaust. I wondered, how did he survive when so many perished? How much depended on resilience, smarts, or dumb luck? As reporters do, I started digging. I uncovered a Nazi paper trial that tracked his life from home, through ghettos, slave labor, concentration camps, death marches, and more. The tattered documents revealed a man very different from the quiet, quintessential Type-B Dad I knew…or thought I knew.
This novel left me feeling both teary-eyed and ennobled. Superficially, it is about two French sisters living through the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. At its root, however, Hannah deconstructs the essence of survival.
I loved how her characters frame the book’s cosmic questions: What would you do to survive? What compromises would you make? Is it better to fight back aggressively or resist passively? The sisters are of different temperaments and personalities. Each answers these questions differently, painfully. I found myself haunted by these themes long after I put The Nightingale back on the shelf. You will, too.
Soon to be a major motion picture, The Nightingale is a multi-million copy bestseller across the world. It is a heart-breakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the endurance of women.
This story is about what it was like to be a woman during World War II when women's stories were all too often forgotten or overlooked . . . Vianne and Isabelle Mauriac are two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals and passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path towards survival, love and freedom in war-torn France.
I’ve always been fascinated by books since a young age. Not just reading the stories but also how they’re written, the cover design, literary agents, and the publishing industry in general. I’ve written five novels (four of which are USA Today bestsellers) and my work has been translated into twenty-five languages worldwide. My second novel, Rise & Shine, Benedict Stone, was made into a Hallmark movie in 2021. I still get excited about generating ideas for characters to take on unusual and joyous journeys of discovery. I’m a huge fan of reading books about the craft of writing, and I especially love novels about bookshops and libraries.
Story Trumps Fiction is a non-fiction book that encourages you to tear up the rule book when it comes to plotting and planning a novel. I’m a plotter at heart, but this book offers some thought-provoking arguments for writing organically, to craft exciting and surprising plots. It’s written by an award-winning novelist, so he’s ideally placed to offer great advice on how to make a story more powerful, emotional, and gripping. I recommend it for both novice writers and more experienced ones, too.
All too often, following the "rules" of writing can constrict rather than inspire you. With Story Trumps Structure, you can shed those rules - about three-act structure, rising action, outlining, and more - to craft your most powerful, emotional, and gripping stories.
Award-winning novelist Steven James explains how to trust the narrative process to make your story believable, compelling, and engaging, and debunks the common myths that hold writers back from creating their best work.
• Ditch your outline and learn to write organically. • Set up promises for readers - and deliver…
I went to Paris the first time when I was nineteen. I was sitting in a cheap restaurant when a man entered carrying a burlap sack filled with escargots, and put some on my plate (all very unsanitary) for me to taste. Delicious! I was in France in the 1970s when Robert Parker was discovering French wine. (We didn’t meet then, but did after my series was published many years later.) Subsequent stays in Paris and other areas of France (Champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy) afforded me a food and wine sensibility that over decades has permeated my lifestyle, my friendships—and my writing.
Adam Gopnik’s book, The Table Comes First: Family, France and the Meaning of Food has it all: essays on the history of restaurants, followed by second on taste, then come the recipes (a stellar one on leg of lamb prepared with bacon and anchovies, saffron and cinnamon), and finally, in Chapter Ten, an essay on wine that is a far cry from the plethora of books on “how to taste.” It calls wine what it is, alcohol, and talks about why it makes us happy. I downloaded this book onto my Kindle a long time ago, and writing about it reminds me to purchase a hard copy of the book in order to place It on my shelf next to Gopnik’s book, Paris to the Moon, written way back in 1995, which is about the year he and his wife and infant son spent in Paris, with great stories…
Never before have we cared so much about food. It preoccupies our popular culture, our fantasies, and even our moralizing—“You still eat meat?” With our top chefs as deities and finest restaurants as places of pilgrimage, we have made food the stuff of secular seeking and transcendence, finding heaven in a mouthful. But have we come any closer to discovering the true meaning of food in our lives?
With inimitable charm and learning, Adam Gopnik takes us on a beguiling journey in search of that meaning as he charts America’s recent and rapid evolution from commendably aware eaters to manic,…
During my MFA, I learned to write family dramas and character-driven fiction, but I wanted more comfort, joy, and… romance! I knew the swoony and funny aspects of rom-coms could lift heavier emotional subjects like grief and loss, allowing readers to explore these resonant aspects of life safely, with a guaranteed Happily Ever After. All the books on this list explore a full emotional range of the human experience through extraordinary, utterly magical love stories about otherwise ordinary, flawed people. I hope they make you laugh, swoon, maybe shed a few cathartic tears, and come out the other side feeling better than when you turned the first page.
This enemies-to-lovers story about a romance writer and a literary fiction writer who strike a bet to write their next book in each other’s genre blew me away with its hilarious dialogue and realistic emotional stakes.
January struggles to write another Happily Ever After upon learning her recently deceased father had a secret life with another woman. She goes to deal with his beach house, only to find that her college writing rival is her neighbor for the summer.
As part of Gus and January’s renewed rivalry, they go on a series of dates to teach each other about their genre, and they develop mutual professional respect that bleeds into attraction.
One highlight is when they write flirty notes and hold them up through their neighboring windows. This is a true rom-com, so hilarious and sexy, but it commits to realism and reaches for heavy, heart-wrenching emotional stakes and the…
FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION AND BOOK LOVERS!
A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.
Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.
They’re polar opposites.
In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they're living in neighboring…
I’ve always been fascinated by books since a young age. Not just reading the stories but also how they’re written, the cover design, literary agents, and the publishing industry in general. I’ve written five novels (four of which are USA Today bestsellers) and my work has been translated into twenty-five languages worldwide. My second novel, Rise & Shine, Benedict Stone, was made into a Hallmark movie in 2021. I still get excited about generating ideas for characters to take on unusual and joyous journeys of discovery. I’m a huge fan of reading books about the craft of writing, and I especially love novels about bookshops and libraries.
This warm, funny book introduces readers to introverted bookseller Nina Hill. When Nina’s estranged father dies, Nina discovers she has a whole host of new relatives she didn’t know about. And what’s more daunting is that they want to get to know her! So, Nina has to come out of her shell and step away from the world of fiction to embrace real life. With a vibrant, attention-grabbing cover and a range of quirky characters to get to know, this novel is sure to appeal to book-lovers everywhere.
“Abbi Waxman is both irreverent and thoughtful.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Giffin
“Meet our bookish millennial heroine—a modern-day Elizabeth Bennet, if you will… Waxman’s wit and wry humor stand out. She is funny and imaginative, and “Bookish” lands a step above run-of-the-mill romantic comedy fare.”—The Washington Post
“Abbi Waxman offers up a quirky, eccentric romance that will charm any bookworm…. For anyone who’s ever wondered if their greatest romance might come between the pages of books they read, Waxman offers a heartwarming tribute to that possibility.”--Entertainment Weekly
