Here are 100 books that The Paris Apartment fans have personally recommended if you like
The Paris Apartment.
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I am Australian but have lived in four other countries – England, Nigeria, USA, and Qatar – so I love reading about life overseas. How does the weather impact daily life, from what people wear to the available activities? How does culture influence behavior? Food, from what’s in the supermarket to the menus at local restaurants, can change the flavors and smells in homes and on the street. And what about alcohol? Does banning wine and spirits impact the vibe? (Hint: yes, it does!) These factors play out in my writing, and I love seeing how other authors portray place on the page.
Having lived as an expat for thirteen years, the title immediately grabbed me. I’ve since read all of Chris Pavone’s books.
Kate moved to Luxembourg for her husband’s job and is trying to settle into her role as a housewife, but a series of strange events make her wonder whether her past life in an unconventional career is catching up with her.
I related to Kate’s struggles of leaving a job she loved to focus on family, both the positives and negatives (minus the life-threatening danger). When I left my career, I started writing to create a portable job I could take with me as we traveled the world for my husband’s work, so I completely understood Kate’s need to find purpose in her life.
Winner of the Edgar and Anthony Awards for Best First Novel
'Bristling with suspense and elegantly crafted' Patricia Cornwell
'Smart, clever suspense, skilfully plotted, and a lot of fun to read' John Grisham
Kate Moore is an expat mum, newly transplanted from Washington D.C. In the cobblestoned streets of Luxembourg, her days are filled with play dates and coffee mornings, her weekends spent in Paris or skiing in the Alps. Kate is also guarding a secret - one so momentous it could destroy her neat little expat life - and she suspects…
"I'm Nicky. Your little sister." With these words from a stranger, Hilda's quiet existence in a marshland cottage with her rescue cats is turned upside down. She resolves to find out the truth about her parents' marriage, her father's secret life and her mother's untimely death.
I am Australian but have lived in four other countries – England, Nigeria, USA, and Qatar – so I love reading about life overseas. How does the weather impact daily life, from what people wear to the available activities? How does culture influence behavior? Food, from what’s in the supermarket to the menus at local restaurants, can change the flavors and smells in homes and on the street. And what about alcohol? Does banning wine and spirits impact the vibe? (Hint: yes, it does!) These factors play out in my writing, and I love seeing how other authors portray place on the page.
I am Australian, and while I haven’t been to Newcastle, the atmospheric bushland, venomous snakes, and stunning but treacherous coastline made me feel right at home. This is Lee Christine’s hometown, and her love and respect for the land are right there on the page.
Layer in a detective with a complicated past, a journalist with a connection to the case, a dead judge, and missing lawyers, and Lee has created a wonderful blend of intrigue, scandal, and budding romance.
I enjoy mysteries with well-developed characters who make me care about their personal lives as well as wanting to solve the case, and Lee achieved this.
After Justice Maurice Tempest dies violently in the Glenrock State Conservation Area in Newcastle, local detective Senior Sergeant Callan O'Connor is urgently called to the scene.
Days later a second body is found in the same location, turning what had looked like a revenge killing into so much more.
Former political journalist Angela Avery has been spending a lot of time at the Hunter Valley prison interviewing a soon-to-be-released forger, and when O'Connor's investigation reveals an interest in him Angela is determined to protect both her source and her fledgling relationship with O'Connor.
I am Australian but have lived in four other countries – England, Nigeria, USA, and Qatar – so I love reading about life overseas. How does the weather impact daily life, from what people wear to the available activities? How does culture influence behavior? Food, from what’s in the supermarket to the menus at local restaurants, can change the flavors and smells in homes and on the street. And what about alcohol? Does banning wine and spirits impact the vibe? (Hint: yes, it does!) These factors play out in my writing, and I love seeing how other authors portray place on the page.
This book combines two of my greatest loves: ballroom dance and mystery novels. The ballroom dance world is designed for drama, especially when the competition is at Blackpool, the Mecca of ballroom dance.
I was fascinated to see this novel was co-written. Shirley Ballas brings the wealth of her ballroom dance experience to the party, including being head judge of Strictly Come Dancing. Her partner, author Sheila McClure, delivers the literary skills. A fabulous partnership.
Behind the sequins and the sparkles, the competition is about to turn deadly . . .
'I loved it! I'm quite convinced I've danced with Lily Richmond, and if anyone can solve a few crimes she can . . .' ANTON DU BEKE
When a promising young dancer collapses during the opening tango of a major competition, Lily Richmond, dance legend, teacher and one-time world champion, is convinced that murder is afoot.
There's only one person who can help Lily solve the mystery: her former student, now turned private detective, Susie Cooper. But Susie vowed she'd never return…
I am Australian but have lived in four other countries – England, Nigeria, USA, and Qatar – so I love reading about life overseas. How does the weather impact daily life, from what people wear to the available activities? How does culture influence behavior? Food, from what’s in the supermarket to the menus at local restaurants, can change the flavors and smells in homes and on the street. And what about alcohol? Does banning wine and spirits impact the vibe? (Hint: yes, it does!) These factors play out in my writing, and I love seeing how other authors portray place on the page.
I lived in Lagos for four and a half years, so a mystery in Nigeria grabbed my attention right away. Vanessa’s descriptions are so vivid that I was transported back there on the page.
I loved the insight into the lives of the Nigerwives—women from other countries married to Nigerian men. The power dynamics within the family were fascinating, and even as I wanted to know what happened to the missing Nigerwife, I was just as intrigued by the cultural insights.
“The perfect beach read…catapults you into a world that most of us have never seen before—and will have you glued to every page.” —HuffPost
“White Lotus meets Big Little Lies” (Good Morning America) in this riveting domestic drama about a young woman who goes missing in Lagos, Nigeria, and her estranged auntie who will stop at nothing to find her.
Nicole Oruwari has the perfect life: a handsome husband, a palatial house in the heart of glittering Lagos, and a glamorous group of friends. She left gloomy London and a troubled family…
I’ve gone to France often during my life. I always buy books that look interesting while I’m there, mainly to keep my French in good shape. I tend to pick authors and subjects which catch my eye. Some get discarded, but most give a fascinating and often very different perspective on life than I find in English novels and essays.
This is a complex and overwhelming book. It covers the detailed contents and history of the rooms and characters in a large apartment block in Paris. Some of the rooms and characters interact in a complex, sometimes dark way. It is a long book, but I found it enthralling all the way through. If you like a detailed, complex, baroque book where you have to read carefully and make connections, this is for you.
In this ingenious book Perec creates an entire microcosm in a Paris apartment block. Serge Valene wants to make an elaborate painting of the building he has made his home for the last sixty years. As he plans his picture, he contemplates the lives of all the people he has ever known there. Chapter by chapter, the narrative moves around the building revealing a marvellously diverse cast of characters in a series of every more unlikely tales, which range from an avenging murderer to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime...
France claimed me early, when I was a teenager. A French major, a Rotary scholarship year in the Loire Valley, and decades of return visits later, I'm still not done with this gorgeous country. Since retirement, my husband and I spend at least several weeks there every year, and in 2011, we lived in France for three months during an adult gap year. My third book, a novel set in Paris and Normandy, is the most recent evidence that France and her food, wine, culture, literature, art and landscapes, have never loosened their hold on me.
I loved this book so much I experienced it twice, first on audio, where the narration is beautiful, and then in print, because the prose deserved to be read on the page.
It is not a plot-driven novel, and that's the point. I found it to be philosophical, unhurried, and deeply attentive: a study of three main characters of different ages and backgrounds in Paris that asks you to slow down and look carefully at the people around you, especially those we tend to overlook. Muriel Barbery finds extraordinary interior lives in ordinary places, and by the end, you may find yourself doing the same.
This is a book that gave me things to think about long after I finished—about beauty, about class, about what it means to truly see another person.
Rene is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building. She maintains a carefully constructed persona as someone uncultivated but reliable, in keeping with what she feels a concierge should be. But beneath this facade lies the real Rene: passionate about culture and the arts, and more knowledgeable in many ways than her employers with their outwardly successful but emotionally void lives. Down in her lodge, apart from weekly visits by her one friend Manuela, Rene lives with only her cat for company. Meanwhile, several floors up, twelve-year-old Paloma Josse is determined to avoid the pampered and vacuous future laid…
I have always been drawn to community, meaning how people get together, live, love, and support each other. That love drew me into caring about cities, in all their various forms, because cities are places for people to gather and build lives together. This can be in an Italian hilltown from the 1000 AD, a 15th-century neighborhood in Barcelona, an elegant street on the Upper East Side of New York City, or a subdivision near a highway interchange in Phoenix. Once I started caring about cities, I started asking why these places are the way they are, and this produced my book.
I can still remember so much from this book. A great stat Hawes included was that in the year 1870, 90 percent of upper-class New Yorkers lived in townhouses or other types of single-family homes. By 1930, 90 percent lived in apartment buildings or “French flats,” as they were sometimes called. Basically, almost alone among American cities, New York chose to emulate Paris in its model of urbanism rather than London.
New York developers built and sold “French flats” that were large and ostentatious, like the Ansonia and the Dakota, which are still there today. These iconic apartment buildings were built along the streetcar and subway lines. Hawes was a writer for The New Yorker, so this is very readable.
Recounts New York City's transformation from a provincial, Victorian town to a bustling city, focusing on the architectural emergence of the apartment building after the Civil War and its influence.
I have been fascinated with mental health since long before I was officially diagnosed with Bipolar I. Even as an elementary schooler, I recognized that I was different from my peers: I thought more deeply and often more darkly, I experienced higher highs and lower lows, often beyond my control, and I very rarely discussed my home life. Writing became a logical and perhaps life-saving outlet as soon as I learned to put words into letters (mostly the wrong letters, but thank God for spell-check).
On New Year's Eve, four Londoners climb to the top of a high rise with the same intention. They've all come for different reasons, but their plan is the same. Instead of ending their lives, however, they save each other.
I love this novel, which is perhaps the truest and most hopeful story about suicide I’ve read. The final scene, which takes place on the one-year anniversary of the opening scene, is something I think of at least once a year, and I am always shaken by its insight. At times, side-splittingly funny and heart-rendingly sad, this is a must-read for anyone recovering from a mental illness.
“One New Year’s Eve, four people with very different reasons but a common purpose find their way to the top of a fifteen-story building in London. None of them has calculated that, on a date humans favor for acts of significance, in a place known as a local suicide-jumpers’ favorite, they might encounter company. A Long Way Down is the story of what happens next, and of what doesn’t.” —The New York Times Book Review
A wise, affecting novel from the beloved, award-winning author of Dickens and Prince, Funny Girl and High Fidelity
I opened my first history book in school at 6 and have been fascinated by how people lived since then. I found the evolution of furniture, interiors, decorations, exteriors, and everything that relates to how we live of the utmost importance if we want to know who we are and why. I am the son of antique dealers, growing up in France, so furniture is my principal domain of expertise, but I always put it in relation to the epoch they are from and the people who used them. I became the go-to of Martha Stewart for antiques and furniture restoration and have been featured in TV shows and magazines regularly.
I always find myself inspired by anything that can simplify your life. I think this book is the future of living for owners of small spaces and anybody who wants a more edited interior.
I love the practical information, the architectural choices made, and the scaling down of furniture and accessories. I try to adapt all those aspects into my own living.
Joel Beath and Elizabeth Price explore this question drawing inspiration from a diverse collection of apartment designs, all smaller than 50m2/540ft2. Through the lens of five small-footprint design principles and drawing on architectural images and detailed floor plans, the authors examine how architects and designers are reimagining small space living.
Full of inspiration we can each apply to our own spaces, this is a book that offers hope and inspiration for a future of our cities and their citizens in which sustainability and style, comfort and affordability can co-exist.…
Being a children’s illustrator and writer, I have built up a well-loved collection of childen’s books over the years. They must have great drawings and imaginative concepts. They are books I can come back to again and again. The books I have chosen are ones where you can lose yourself in their intricate detailed worlds and forget about day-to-day troubles for a while. These books can also help reluctant readers by enticing them into a visual world first and then into appreciating the written word.
This book has so much detail to keep the reader fascinated. It’s like looking inside a doll’s house with its constant activity from all the families and residents living there and what they get up to over the course of a day. Each page is a gem and the intricate detail keeps you engrossed in their lives. Adults would enjoy this book too. I still have my well-loved copy from 1995.
Illustrates a day in the life of an apartment building by showing activities going on in different units at various times between 7:00 a.m. and 1:00 a.m.
