Tour Versailles’ 2,100 acres as its gardener-in-chief of 40 years describes its fascinating history in this “eccentric and charming” love letter for gardeners and Francophiles (New York Times).In Alain Baraton’s Versailles, every grove tells a story. As the gardener-in-chief, Baraton lives on its grounds, and since 1982 he has devoted his life to the gardens, orchards, and fields that were loved by France’s kings and queens as much as the palace itself. Hi...

*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti*Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World ...

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • With a new introduction by Catherine Lacey • Set in eighteenth-century France, the classic novel that provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man’s indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder.In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices h...

“Beautifully written and refreshingly original . . . makes us see [Paris] in a different light.”—San Francisco Chronicle Book ReviewSwapping 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 Mon...

The New York Times bestseller: the secrets of the City of Light, revealed in the lives of the great, the near-great, and the forgotten—by the author of the acclaimed The Discovery of France.This is the Paris you never knew. From the Revolution to the present, Graham Robb has distilled a series of astonishing true narratives, all stranger than fiction, of the lives of the great, the near-great, and the forgotten.A young artillery lieutenant, strolling throu...

One of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1: The Way by Swann's is published in a new translation from the French by Lydia Davis in Penguin Classics.The Way by Swann's is one of the great novels of childhood, depicting the impressions of a sensitive boy of his family and neighbours, brought dazzlingly back to life by the famous taste of a madeleine. It contains the separate shor...

**The award-winning, nationally bestselling translation, by Lydia Davis, of one of the world’s most celebrated novels“The best English version by far, because its deadpan reminds us that the book is both a great realist novel and a satire of realism.” —Merve Emre, The New Yorker**Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs in an effort to make her life ...

From Susan Vreeland, bestselling author of such acclaimed novels as Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Luncheon of the Boating Party, and Clara and Mr. Tiffany, comes a richly imagined story of a woman’s awakening in the south of Vichy France—to the power of art, to the beauty of provincial life, and to love in the midst of war.In 1937, young Lisette Roux and her husband, André, move from Paris to a village in Provence to care for André’s grandfather Pascal. ...

This Art Book contains reproductions of Claude Monet drawings. Book includes Table of Contents and is formatted for all e-readers and Tablets (use rotate and/or zoom feature on landscape/horizontal images for optimal viewing). Claude Monet (1840-1926) is one of the best-known and most beloved painters in the history of art, master of landscape scenes, rapidly executed in front of the motif, in vibrant oil paint directly onto a canvas. And yet there remains a previously undiscovered a...

Christian Dior (1905-1957) rocketed to fame with his first collection in 1947 when the 'New Look' took the world by storm. Originally published in 1957, this charming and modest autobiography gives a fascinating and detailed insight into the workings of a great fashion house, while revealing the private man behind the high-profile establishment. This book is part of the V&A Fashion Perspectives Series. Selected by V&A publishing in consultation with our world-leading fashion curators, the ...

"An illuminating portrait" of the palace―its architecture, its scandals, its politics, and its role in France's tumultuous history ( The New York Times Book Review).The story of Versailles is one of historical drama, under the last three kings of France's old regime, mixed with the high camp and glamour of the European courts, all in an iconic home for the French arts. The palace itself has been radically altered since 1789, and the court was long ago swep...

Today, it is difficult to imagine a living room without a sofa. When the first sofas on record were delivered in seventeenth-century France, the result was a radical reinvention of interior space. Symptomatic of a new age of casualness and comfort, the sofa ushered in an era known as the golden age of conversation; as the first piece of furniture designed for two, it was also considered an invitation to seduction. With the sofa came many other changes in interior space we now take for gran...