Here are 99 books that The Paris Connection fans have personally recommended if you like
The Paris Connection.
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I like to tell people that I found my passion in life and it's books. I write them, read them, review them and I’ve been a librarian for 17 years. (I’ve worked in libraries for longer than that. Over 25 years!) It’s been dark times recently and romance has become my happy place. I’m a sucker for romances with pretty covers, quirky characters, and not so much of the on-page spice. If there’s some travel involved, even better!
I read this book after going through the hardest year of my life. I’d celebrated a milestone birthday followed shortly thereafter by the death of my dad. I was trying to cope with my grief and figure out how to be me again. This was the first book I picked up that year that I was able to read. It made me smile again and it filled my heart with joy. It was so well-written. The unusual setting of Finnish Lapland was a real treat. It just made me so happy that it’ll always be a special book to me.
'Wow!!...This is a must read, heartwarming Christmas story. I would easily give this book hundreds of stars' Little Miss Book Lover 87
Sylvie Magnusson is going to be lonely this Christmas. Instead of jetting off for her honeymoon, she's freezing at home in Cheshire. Guess that's what happens when your fiance dumps you a week before your wedding...
Sylvie's best friend, Nari, plans a trip to see the Northern Lights and get Sylvie's mojo back. But as their Lapland getaway approaches, Sylvie realises that Frozen Falls is the hometown of Stellan Virtanen, her dreamy Finnish ex-boyfriend, the one that got…
I like to tell people that I found my passion in life and it's books. I write them, read them, review them and I’ve been a librarian for 17 years. (I’ve worked in libraries for longer than that. Over 25 years!) It’s been dark times recently and romance has become my happy place. I’m a sucker for romances with pretty covers, quirky characters, and not so much of the on-page spice. If there’s some travel involved, even better!
This book blew me away. I have never read a book like this, let alone a romance. The female main character suffers from a rare liver disease that requires a donor for her survival. Sounds pretty grim, right? Well, the prognosis is dire but the story is charming, heartwarming, and ultimately up-lifting. I enjoyed the perspective of a main character hoping for a donor in addition to the unfolding love story. (There’s also an amazing bestie relationship to make you swoon.) Plus, the cover is absolutely gorgeous. It’s a work of art all the way around.
I’m Jules Kelly, a certified bohemian boss babe, whose hip tech company just won subsidized office space in the coolest co-working space in town. From a distance I seem poised to take over the world (or at least the travel industry), and I would be if it weren’t for two big complications:
1. A rare and seriously inconvenient disease is tanking my health by the day, and my only hope for a cure—a transplant—is moving further from my grasp.
2. A soulless database company is sharing my new office…
I like to tell people that I found my passion in life and it's books. I write them, read them, review them and I’ve been a librarian for 17 years. (I’ve worked in libraries for longer than that. Over 25 years!) It’s been dark times recently and romance has become my happy place. I’m a sucker for romances with pretty covers, quirky characters, and not so much of the on-page spice. If there’s some travel involved, even better!
I loved this book! I was especially fond of taking the tour of India with the main character, Niki, who had never been to India before, despite the fact that her family is Indian and she’s 29 years old. She unexpectedly finds herself with the opportunity to go to India for her best friend’s wedding. While she’s there, she gets to celebrate Diwali at a big party when who should she meet but a handsome musician. The setting is fantastic, the characters are so lovable. This was just an excellent feel-good book.
"Lalli's prose is deft, her characters are delightful and her book is the just-right holiday romance."--USA Today
One type-A data analyst discovers her free-spirited side on an impulsive journey from bustling Mumbai to the gorgeous beaches of Goa and finds love waiting for her on Christmas morning.
Twenty-nine-year-old Niki Randhawa has always made practical decisions. Despite her love for music and art, she became an analyst for the stability. She's always stuck close to home, in case her family needed her. And she's always dated guys that seem good on paper, rather than the ones who give her butterflies. When…
I like to tell people that I found my passion in life and it's books. I write them, read them, review them and I’ve been a librarian for 17 years. (I’ve worked in libraries for longer than that. Over 25 years!) It’s been dark times recently and romance has become my happy place. I’m a sucker for romances with pretty covers, quirky characters, and not so much of the on-page spice. If there’s some travel involved, even better!
This was one of those books that I just held in my hands quietly for a few moments after I finished reading it because I felt like I’d just finished a masterpiece. (Does anyone say that about a romance novel? I do, because this book has it all.)
I’ve always loved writing and what this author pulled off in the writing of this book is worthy of a standing ovation. The layers of the plot, those tidbits of information in the beginning that end up having a lot of meaning at the end. Ah! It was so beautifully and skillfully done! This is one of those books that makes me want to be a better writer. It’s an inspiration, and a really great story too!
A fantastic debut from a hilarious and brilliantly original new voice in women’s fiction.
Love is for suckers...isn’t it?
My brother’s getting married in a few weeks and asked for help picking a song for his first dance. I suggested Kiss’ ‘Love’s a Slap in the Face’. It didn’t go down well.
When she was a teenager, Zoë Frixos fell in love with Simon Baxter, her best friend and the boy next door. But his family moved to America before she could tell him how she felt and, like a scratched record, she’s never quite moved on. Now, almost 20…
As well as being a novelist (ten published books to date), I’m a Senior Lecturer in Prose at Liverpool John Moores University. My current academic fields of interest are the role Johanna van Gogh-Bonger played in Vincent’s rise to fame, the silencing of women involved in creative pursuits, and the consideration of a novelist’s ethical and moral responsibilities when fictionalising a real life. My true passion lies in the creative uncovering of those erased stories, and in adding to the emerging conversation. That’s why I’ve shifted from writing contemporary to historical novels. I’m also known as the international, bestselling author Caroline Smailes (The Drowning of Arthur Braxton).
Martin Bailey is an expert on all things Van Gogh, and any of his books could have been recommended.
This one though - if we are learning about influences that have shaped and guided and disconcerted Vincent - has to be considered. To know the artist is to understand the numerous homes and landscapes that have shaped and influenced both him and his art. In an era when people rarely left the area where they were born, Van Gogh was both a traveller and unsettled.
This book made me truly consider what that might actually mean.
Vincent van Gogh was a restless soul. He spent his twenties searching for a vocation and once he had determined to become an artist, he remained a traveller, always seeking fresh places for the inspiration and opportunities he needed to create his work.
Living with Vincent van Gogh tells the story of the great artist's life through the lens of the places where he lived and worked, including Amsterdam, London, Paris and Provence, and examines the impact of these cityscapes and landscapes on his creative output. Featuring artworks, unpublished archival documents and contemporary landscape photography, this book provides unique insight…
I’ve been writing queer historical romances/murder mysteries since the third grade when I accidentally wrote a pretty homoerotic Sherlock Holmes fanfiction despite being too young to know what any of those words meant. I’m now both a writer and reader of the genre and while I’m delighted that so many other people love gay historical romance as much as I do, I feel like I always see the same few books recommended. I wanted to share some of my lesser-known favorites so that they can get the love they richly deserve and so that there are more people who can geek-out about them with me!
Honestly, I could recommend all of Bonnie Dee’s back catalog, but this one in particular has always stuck with me. I think what I love most is that the setup seems like a standard Beauty and the Beast type tale, but instead, a thoughtful (and incredibly hot!) novel that doesn’t shy away from the fact that one of the characters is far from traditionally handsome, but embraces it.
I really cheered him on as he began to see himself in a new light, the way the man who loves him sees him.
Creating love from darkness is the greatest art…Living a bohemian lifestyle in Paris is wonderful for Teddy Dandridge, but disastrous for his finances. His unconventional artistic creations find few buyers. After a year of failure, he returns to England to fulfill a portrait commission for a wealthy family, but he finds a different, source of inspiration secreted away in their sprawling house. Isolated and rejected by his family, Phineas Abernathy haunts the west wing like a ghost. A physical deformity has locked him away from society for all his life. Filling his days with reading and drawing, he dreams of…
When my daughter was three years old, I enrolled her in a “creative movement” class. I had taken dance lessons for ten years when I was younger, so this felt like an obvious choice. At age eleven, her teacher suggested that she had the facility, talent, and drive to pursue a career in ballet. What followed was seven years of being a “ballet mom,” as she studied, performed, competed, and ultimately left home to pursue her career. The Still Point comes from this experience. It's a novel about dark ambition, but it's also a love letter: to my daughter, to ballet, and to the mothers who became my closest friends inside the ballet studio walls.
This novel, besides having a gorgeous cover, offers a sneak peek through the window into the lives of professional dancers at the Paris Opera Ballet.
It follows three young women from their days as students into adulthood. The plot has many twists and turns, but it is primarily a novel about female relationships in the cutthroat world of professional ballet.
Thirteen years ago, Delphine Leger abandoned her prestigious soloist spot at the Paris Opera Ballet for a new life in St. Petersburg -- taking with her a secret that could upend the lives of her best friends, fellow dancers Lindsay and Margaux. Now thirty-six years old, Delphine has returned to her former home and to the legendary Palais Garnier Opera House, to choreograph the ballet that will kickstart the next phase of her career -- and, she hopes, finally make things right with her former friends. But Delphine quickly discovers that things have changed while she's been away...and some secrets…
I grew up in a small, Midwestern town where people sinned Monday through Saturday, then went to church on Sunday to stock up on absolution for the coming week. It was also a place where people wanted to be well-thought of, if thought of at all, and could be at their best when things were at their worst. I wanted to escape as soon as possible, yet now as old memories become more accessible than recent ones, I realize that I never escaped at all. I write about small towns, perhaps to avenge, perhaps as homage; perhaps because it is still, after all these years, what I best know.
Regent’s of Paris takes place in a struggling small town automobile dealership during the week preceding a Memorial Day sale.
It’s Glengarry Glen Ross without shoving the reader into a tar pit of despair. I like books that don’t make readers need a shower and antidepressants at the end, at the same time addressing uncomfortable truths. This one delivers with a measure of cynicism.
There’s cynicism in my own work too. I view a cynic as a blend of idealism and sentiment: idealistic enough to see the world as it should be and sentimental enough to recall the exact moment of his/her/their disillusionment.
Regent's of Paris takes place in a struggling small-town auto dealership during the tumultuous week leading up to the annual Memorial Day sale-a week rife with doomsday warnings about the Obama Administration's corporate bailout of General Motors, and the week which will ultimately seal the dealership's fate. Paul Stenger's thirtieth birthday is looming and selling cars is soiling his conscience, complicating his love life, and killing his songwriting ambitions. But Paul's problems pale in comparison to those of Jennylee Witt, a young mother navigating her workplace's rampant sexism, a chronically-ill daughter, a deadbeat spouse, and a crisis of faith-not to…
I became fascinated with France and the French as a child, and over the past 40 years I have spent as much time as I can here. I’ve been fortunate to be able to combine my dual passions—for France and for literature—in creating a series of classes for CUNY study abroad programs and for the Politics & Prose bookstore. Through this work, over the past 20+ years I have spent much of my time reading and teaching works of literature that explore France and the French people in depth. I now live in France, and I continue to find the French endlessly fascinating. I think I always will.
People often ask me what is the best book to take with them to Paris if they can only take one, and this is the book I always recommend. This collection of essays, which can easily fit into a purse or a backpack, is brimming over with fascinating stories about “the people, places, and phenomena” of Paris. Downie’s encyclopedic knowledge of history, and the idiosyncratic curiosity that draws him (and his readers along with him) into a variety of offbeat situations make for fun as well as highly informative reading. It’s a great book to take with you to read in Paris, or sitting at home dreaming of or remembering Paris—and the selection of topics is varied enough that I believe there’s something in it to interest almost anyone.
“Beautifully written and refreshingly original . . . makes us see [Paris] in a different light.”—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
Swapping his native San Francisco for the City of Light, travel writer David Downie arrived in Paris in 1986 on a one-way ticket, his head full of romantic notions. Curiosity and the legs of a cross-country runner propelled him daily from an unheated, seventh-floor walk-up garret near the Champs-Elysées to the old Montmartre haunts of the doomed painter Modigliani, the tombs of Père-Lachaise cemetery, the luxuriant alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens and the aristocratic Île Saint-Louis midstream in the Seine.…
Dana Thomas is the author of Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano and the New York Times bestseller Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. Thomas began her career writing for the Style section of The Washington Post, and for fifteen years she served as a cultural and fashion correspondent for Newsweek in Paris. She is currently a contributing editor for British Vogue, and a regular contributor to The New York Times Style section and Architectural Digest. She wrote the screenplay for Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams, a feature documentary directed by Luca Guadagnino. In 2016, the French Minister of Culture named Thomas a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. She lives in Paris.
Ballard was the Paris editor for American Vogue between the wars, before returning to New York to help run the glossy. In 1960, she published her memoir, In My Fashion, a wonderful snapshot not only of the fashion industry during the European Modernist era, but also of life as a young single American woman in Paris at its most Paris-y. You don’t have to be a fashion lover to love this book.
Bettina Ballard, Paris-based correspondent and later Fashion Editor for US Vogue, was at the centre of the fashion world from the 1930s to the ’50s and an intimate of Coco Chanel, Cristóbal Balenciaga and Elsa Schiaparelli. With journalistic flair, she captures the spirit of pre-war Paris, the working methods of the fashion greats and the transformation of the post-war fashion industry with the arrival of Dior.
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