Footprints in Paris

A Few Streets, A Few Lives

Gillian Tindall

$42.99

Paperback

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English

Pimlico
03 May 2010

A unique book about the Left Bank and five generations of a family - all of whom left their footprints in the same narrow streets, and all of whom found refuge and rejuvenation in Paris.

Gillian Tindall is well known for her ability to breathe a passionate life into the generations of those who have walked the earth before us. Here, using a handful of lives, she evokes the texture and atmosphere of a hidden Paris which has survived against all the odds of time and chance. Her study shows how Paris has drawn into its magnetic field people who have variously found there education or enlightenment, a refuge or a secret garden, even a different identity.

Five individuals, all related in some way, reveal a web of human feeling and experiences across two centuries. There is the young doctor who walked from Edinburgh to Paris at the time of Napoleon's downfall; the self-made Victorian businessman who traded with the brash capital of the Second Empire; his reserved son who found in the old stones of Paris a refuge from his fraught childhood; Maud, the archetypal English spinster, who somehow managed to construct an alternatative experience in Paris; and Julia , young and desperate, who found her own unlikely salvation there in a very different era.

Gillian Tindall brings Paris alive - whether it's the network of streets that form the Left Bank, the resonance of 'Bohemia' and its garrets, cafes and artists, 'Gay Paree' with its music halls and courtesans or the past chroniclers of the city such as Zola, George du Maurier and Orwell. But featured far more than the famous, are the unsung citizens for whom Gillian Tindall has such empathy.

By: Gillian Tindall
Imprint: Pimlico
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm, Spine: 27mm
Weight: 497g
ISBN: 9781845950897
ISBN 10: 1845950895
Pages: 368
Publication Date: 03 May 2010
Recommended Age: From 0 years
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Gillian Tindall is a master of miniaturist history, making much of an unknown person or single situation, and staking out a particular territory in idiosyncratic non-fiction that is brilliantly evocative of place. She lives in Kentish Town, the subject of her book The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village.

Reviews for Footprints in Paris: A Few Streets, A Few Lives

Tindall writes of a lost Paris with a quiet eloquence that is all her own, combining scrupulous honesty with a compassionate imagination and an eye for memorable detail -- Miranda Seymour Guardian It's a fascinating walking tour of old Paris, studded with humour and sympathetic glimpses into several lives that have resisted the microscope of history -- Tim Martin Telegraph The book's true strength lies in its writer's abiding, for-better-for-worse attachment to her city of the heart -- Jonathan Keates Sunday Telegraph Tindall's alertness to detail and brimming intelligence are consistently engaging -- Frances Spalding The Independent delightful book invites reflection, speculation, argument, and almost every page also summons memories -- Allan Massie Literary Review