EXCERPT: I was taking a pee in the bathroom when I caught sight of myself in the mirror. My face looked so beautiful that I turned to look more closely, spraying the tiles round the toilet in my hurry. I shook my zib and put it back inside my boxers so I could study my face. It was like someone had drawn a faint shadow beneath the cheekbones, then put a touch of mascara on my lashes. The eyes had a depth I’d never seen before. I put my head to one side and smiled, then furrowed my brow as though I was being serious, but the eyes stayed the same – twinkling with a kind of humour and experience. This was the face of someone old beyond my years.

How could it be I’d never noticed before just how beautiful I was? Not regular handsome maybe like an old-time film star and not indie blank like a modern one. More a mix of soul and sexiness. With noble bones.

I flipped the glass to magnifying and back to normal. I held a hand mirror up to turn the reflection on itself, so it sat right-way on. I backed against the wall, then went fisheye close. It made no difference. True, I’d smoked a little kif, but only a little, which was all I liked, and I’d had a Coke to keep my sugar level up (a tip from a boy in my year). I felt happy to think this person was me. No harm could come to someone who looked like that. The ways of peace and righteousness were ours. Not to mention soft-skinned girls and travel to distant places.

We stared into one another’s eyes for a few more minutes.

Then he spoke.

He said, ‘You got to get out, man. You gotta get out.’

I felt myself nodding in agreement.

Because I’d known this anyway, for quite a while. There was nothing shocking in what he said, it was more of a relief.

‘Go now.’

‘I will. Any day now.’

ABOUT 'PARIS ECHO': Here is Paris as you have never seen it before – a city in which every building seems to hold the echo of an unacknowledged past, the shadows of Vichy and Algeria.

American postdoctoral researcher Hannah and runaway Moroccan teenager Tariq have little in common, yet both are susceptible to the daylight ghosts of Paris. Hannah listens to the extraordinary witness of women who were present under the German Occupation; in her desire to understand their lives and through them her own, she finds a city bursting with clues and connections. Out in the migrant suburbs, Tariq is searching for a mother he barely knew. For him, in his innocence, each boulevard, Métro station and street corner is a source of surprise.

MY THOUGHTS: Paris Echo is a slow-moving book, but one that has a certain charm. It is beautifully written, it's characters unusual but all the more captivating for that.

It is Tariq who features in the above excerpt. He is quite narcissistic, in the way that most teenagers are. And yet I could not help but warm to him. He is somewhat naive in the ways of the world - he is a 19-year-old virgin which doesn't particularly please him, yet he seems to find it quite difficult to shed his virginity. Although the reason he gives for going to Paris is that he is searching for his mother, the real reason is not that at all.

I also liked Hannah. She is very self-contained. She has had her heart broken in the past and is determined to never be in that situation again. Yet she opens her home to a much younger Moroccan boy who is destitute. Odd bedfellows (only a saying - don't read anything into it!) but they become friends and help one another out.

I enjoyed listening to the recordings of Parisian women detailing their lives in Paris under the German occupation. It provided another layer to this story and a bond between Hannah and Tariq. There is a lot of history woven into the storyline, from the German Occupation to the long and uneasy relationship between France and Algeria. I came away from this read knowing a lot more about France's history than I did prior to reading Paris Echo.

Another quietly powerful and beautifully written book from Sebastian Faulks.

⭐⭐⭐.9

#ParisEcho #NetGalley

THE AUTHOR: Sebastian Faulks was born in 1953, and grew up in Newbury, the son of a judge and a repertory actress. He and his family live in London.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Random House UK, Cornerstone, Hutchinson via NetGalley for providing a digital ARC of Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks was published September 06, 2018

I'm unsure how to express my opinion about this book, partly because I'm not entirely sure exactly what my opinion is, and partly because the book itself is such a wildly mixed bag. Certain parts I really enjoyed - the historical aspects especially - while others just did not work for me. At times I felt I was merely reading a beautifully written A-Z of Paris with the amount of street names Faulks includes! The locations of Paris are described in manner that conjures up an image of a map rather than any sense of the feel of the place. The plot is scanty at best and some of the dialogue, especially towards the end, is really awkward. I did like the 2 MCs but they just didn't really do much or develop convincingly. Overall, I felt this is quality writing but fairly unsatisfying content and I came away not fully understanding what the novel is actually about nor what its intentions are.

Finally got round to reading this. Yet again a great read from Sebastian Faulks. Wonderful sense of time and place and i learnt a lot of background history to Paris , which made uncomfortable reading.

I love Sebastian Faulks and this did not disappoint in the slightest. I loved every page of this book and would recommend it to anyone and everyone.

I have been keenly devouring books by Faulks ever since reading Birdsong in college. This book certainly lives up to his stellar reputation. An absolute treat of a novel.

Brilliant. This is a wonderful novel from a master storyteller. Mysterious and beguiling with emotive descriptions of Paris from the present day and an earlier time. Is it a ghost story? - I think yes, but not in any traditional sense.
A great and memorable read.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House UK for the review copy. This is an unbiased review of the author's work and style. If you want plot lines and spoilers please see the publishers blurb and other reviewers' reports.
I always have mixed feelings when reading a Sebastian Faulks book, I want to like it and sometimes I do, but at other times his pacing irritates me, and whilst the writing is very good I find myself becoming bored. I recognise that the fault lies with me and so when the boredom set in with Paris Echo I persevered and finished the book.
Here the use of two separate tellers was interesting, but I found it confusing, and as more than one other reviewer has pointed out some of the characters arrive have some characterisation applied, then they just disappear?
So, over all I would say if you are a committed Faulks fan you will love this book, if however, like me you are ambivalent, then it may hinge on the toss of a coin.
Four stars for the good writing losing one star for the lost characters.

Set in Paris our character Hannah an American academic is researching the lives of the women within the capital during the War/ German Occupation. Hannah meets Tariq a young Moroccan who has come to Paris to find out his late half french Mother. Both are trying to escape from their lives and see the research as a form of escapism and a way to answer questions or reveal facts. They form a close platonic friendship that intertwines and allows them to really help each other with there own personal missions and shape the direction they are now to take in life.
It's about perceptions and perspectives, how we see ourselves and others see us.
The book contains colonialism, racism, radicalism, feminism and much history but it never felt too heavy and was very readable. I found interesting how the dark side of Paris was presented, the homelessness and immigrants in contrast to the high end that we normally see.
And I found fascinating the stories from Hannah of the woman during the occupation and the hardships they endured and the quest for survival.
A well crafted atmospheric book which I enjoyed.
My thanks go to the publisher, author and Netgalley in proving this arc in return for a honest review.

I did not enjoy this book as I found it a very slow start with characters that were not interesting. I can praise Sebastian for all the research but found that too often this was just factual regurgitation and did not flow that well.

Tariq is a teenager from Morocco who longs to travel to Paris. He knows his mother was born there, that one of her parents was French. He doesn’t know what happened to her and partly from a desire to learn more, and partly simply from the desire to escape the routine of his school life, he takes his passport and travels into France on the back of a lorry.

Hannah is American and just over thirty. She’s been in Paris before. It was there she met the man who broke her heart all those years ago. Returning now is a chance not only to generate new research for a history book being written by her professor back in the states about women’s lives during the occupation of Paris by the Germans, but also to confront that earlier version of herself, the more carefree Hannah who was open to new experiences and people, whose suffering forced the older Hannah to disconnect from the present and pursue a love of the people of the past.

Tariq is handsome. He is a virgin. He embraces the positive and muddles through into France and then Paris, eventually finding not only places to sleep but a job. When a homeless girl he meets persuades Hannah to let them lodge in her rented apartment, Tariq forges a connection with Hannah that pits his ignorant enthusiasm against her knowledgeable and serious approach to life as an extenuation of the past. Both learn from each other.

I really enjoyed reading this novel. Despite the difficult history it unveils – looking at the French collaboration with the Germans, how they helped to round up Jews and send them off to die; as well as the Algerian War and the 1961 Paris massacre – the novel’s approach to the past is whimsical and searing, painful and healing. Faulks forces the characters to look not only at the past, but at themselves as separate individuals, externalising their experience as an exploration of the autoscopy in de Musset’s poetry. We can ghost ourselves, see ourselves from the outside, exist in ways that allow us to confront ourselves and the past in ways that feel present. We can hear the echos of ourselves and the many others before us in the steps we take through the city streets. And, through the other people that Tariq meets in his travels – one a strange puppet performer who travels the metro under the name Victor Hugo (could he somehow be the real Victor Hugo?) – we are asked to rethink religion as an attempt to think about and explain what we cannot see rather than something formal to fight over. These musings make the novel pleasing on so many levels.

So while the narrative feels gentle – the main characters progress optimistically towards a greater self-fulfilment – the novel is anything but. There is an unflinching questioning spirit that allows narrative to spin history out of the past and into the living and breathing minds in the present. I really enjoyed Paris Echo and wish there were more novels that explored such difficult European territory.

I’d heard so many great things about Sebastian Faulks and his writing and was really looking forward to reading my first book by him. Sadly, I have such mixed feelings about this book. There were some things that I really enjoyed and some that I just didn’t like and didn’t work for me.

The first thing that I didn’t like was that for me this book just started off very slow. I nearly gave up on it. I did really enjoy the historical part of this book, I thought it was interesting and very well researched.

I did like how this book is written in first person with alternate narratives from 2 different perspectives. I thought this was good at first but as I read on I felt the two characters didn’t  really connect well together. Therefore, it made me feel like I couldn’t really connect with the characters. When it comes to the characters I had mixed feeling about them. They were interesting but yet at times they seemed to be unrelatable and unrealistic especially in some of the things they did through the book.

This particular book was not for me probably because I was expecting an action-packed war time thriller and I didn’t get that, but I’m sure it will be a hit with the devoted fans of Sebastian Faulks, and there for if you enjoyed his previous books then I recommend this one.

I would like to thank NetGalley and the publishers Hutchinson (Random House UK) for my review copy in return for an honest and unbiased review.

This is a delicious book. Paris, both past and present is brought to life, forming the backdrop for characters who one can believe in. The book brings up difficult cultural issues about France’s past which reverberate today. Perhaps the past and how it shapes the present, is something many Counties can reflect on. I did not want to leave these pages, characters, places, bars, food, drink, smells - but have been left longing to go back to Paris and see it in a new light.

I’m a big fan of Faulks, and Paris Echo was no disappointment. Set in Paris, this is the tale of Tariq originally arriving on the hunt for his mother before this is quickly forgotten on meeting women.. This is the tale of the real Paris, not the tourist facade, whilst simultaneously regressing to 1940s Nazi occupied Paris, reminding us that history lives on and echoes through the ages.

Faulks' novel looks at the actions of Parisians and the French Resistance during the war from a different angle. Our experience of it is acquired from witness accounts collected by Hannah, a modern-day writer, and her young tenant who helps with the translations of accounts. The upshot of Faulks' writing is that he really makes you think about the utter confusion the local Parisians experienced as they collaborated for one side and then for the other.
Although I thought this was a refreshing approach I did find it slow-going, especially at the beginning and, I do feel that if you're expecting an action-packed war-time thriller you would be disappointed.
Thank you to NetGalley and Hutchinson (Penguin Random House Group) for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

I don’t know what I was expecting from this from Sebastian Faulks, but I found this to be a bit of a mish mash of contemporary and historical fiction with a bit of War time drama and I found some of it a little confusing.

Tariq is a runaway, who has travelled to Paris to find out more about his mother.....Hannah, although she doesn’t know him, let him stay in her spare room.

Tariq’s story, Hannah’s story and Hannah’s research trickle their way throughout the book. Tariq seemingly even interacts with a woman from the 1940’s.

The historical part of the book I found very interesting but I’m afraid the rest was a little dry...not one for me but I’m sure fans of Faulks will love it.

I would like to thank the Author/the Publishers/NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for a fair and honest review

A rather different book from Sebastian Faulks. Modern-day Paris overlaps with the Paris of Victor Hugo and World War 2.

An intriguing and enjoyable read

Confession time: I have never read a Sebastian Faulks novel.  Not even Birdsong, which everyone my age seemed to read during A’Levels as it seemed to cover lots of the War Poets and all that area of history and literature.  I found it to be stuffy and a bit dull, if I remember rightly. Filled with adult thoughts and abstract themes.  I tried and failed to read Charlotte Gray as even at 16, the most tumultuous time of life, it was a bit too angsty for me.

“Paris, Echo” fitted my bill as it has a city in the title. Honestly, it’s also quite short so I thought if I was going to have another go it’d be a good idea to do with as few pages as possible!

It starts with Tariq, a teenage boy obsessed with two things: himself and having sex with a woman.  He runs away to Paris via a largely undisclosed route, he ends up in the back of a lorry with a French girl who gets them to Paris and then gets sick. Tariq’s voice is distinctive – narcissistic and naïve.  It’s quite fun to be him for a while, and the descriptions of the different parts of Paris are vivid enough to be interesting.

Just as I was getting tired of Tariq’s quest for losing his virginity, the voice switches to Hannah. She’s an American in Paris on a historical academic research assignment. She’s lonely, and returns to Paris in an attempt to rediscover the last time she was happy, nearly two decades previous.

The two meet and Tariq becomes her lodger. I thought this was a bit of a jarring moment – perhaps I’m not as kind as Hannah but I would not feel comfortable taking in a couple of teens from the street, especially sick ones. Maybe I should be nicer, as it works well for Hannah. Together the two of them become friends, and their separate explorations of Paris as a city now and then intertwine and overlap in a fascinating way.

There is so much history all around us and it’s easy to forget as we walk down the street in our daily lives that other people have lived, loved and died in these buildings, in the ones there previously.  Living in Norwich especially, we are surrounded by history that dates back more than 1000 years. One thousand years! Nestled between Wilkos and Iceland, that bit of wall from the 9th century. 

We learn from history and Tariq and Hannah draw their own conclusions from the brush with the past they have. Talking to an old woman from the resistance, Hannah is awed by her experiences. Tariq is dismissive as he can speak better French than Hannah – he is appalled by the old woman’s coarse vernacular. I enjoyed the intersection between judgements – what was perceived, what happened and how they reacted separately.

This was a good introduction to Faulks and I might well try to read Birdsong again at some point. A nice distraction and interesting to read – a good way to pass the time.

Thanks to Netgalley for giving me access to a copy.

Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks sounded like an interesting book. Alas, I found myself not especially engrossed in the tale. I ended up giving up the book, thinking I would give it another try later on. In truth, I will never get back to it. Some books are just not my cup of coffee!

I am a great admirer of Sebastian Faulks's novels, but this one I found disappointing. The fractured timeline wasn't always easy to follow, and I found the characters were difficult to connect with. It is fine to have unfinished stories and plot lines in a literary novel, but there seemed too many in this one. Sandrine simply faded away and I wondered why she was even necessary. Faulks is one of the greatest contemporary war story novelists alive today but perhaps this rich vein has run dry for him. I hope not, but even if it has, he can write almost anything well.

It's a while since I read one of Sebastian Faulks' books so I was pleased to receive an ARC thanks to Net Galley and the publisher .This book isn't a big hitter like 'Birdsong' or 'Charlotte Gray' but it deals in part with the theme of women in wartime ,as they did.
The story is told through two characters, Tariq, a young Moroccan, and Hannah,an American academic. Tariq enters France illegally ,aiming to try and find out about his half French' mother,who died when he was a child.Hannah is researching the lives of Parisian women in during the German occupation.The two form a friendship, and the book deals with their relationship but also with the story of the women Hannah researches.
It's an interesting depiction of a side of Paris that' not many of us see,and the experience Tariq both Hannah and Tariq have as outsiders. The wartime stories of women's lives are fascinating.
I enjoyed reading 'Paris Echo' and was particularly impressed with the descriptions of Paris that are well away from the touristy picture that most of us have. The characters are well drawn and credible.
I would recommend this novel .