“. . . narrated in gorgeous, elegiac prose . . . a very enjoyable and strongly recommended read. . . . deserves to be nominated in the fiction category of book prize competitions.” --- David Cooper in New York Journal of Books
When Matilde Anselm, professor of cardiac anesthesiology, arrives in Paris from New York in the winter of 1990 to participate in a heart transplant, she has no hint of the fate awaiting her. The city is convulsed with street protests against the First Gulf War, and her calm is torn by doubts about the transplant and the surgeon who will perform it. When she is summoned by a lawyer to take possession of a mysterious bequest from a stranger—a tiny Paris apartment packed with secrets—and after she engages a passionate, volatile young radical to translate a trove of old love letters, she finds herself in an altered world where coincidence is destiny and certainties turn treacherous, where a minor traffic accident foretells a fateful sisterhood, and a punch from Matilde spills a man's blood and ignites a love affair. A place where good intentions draw her inexorably to the fugitive side of the law and the deadly side of romance. “I know why we must try so hard to live,” Matilde Anselm declares, but her assumptions about what life means—and whose life she is leading—are violently upended, as a month in beautiful Paris becomes a twilight journey to the center of herself. Paris Twilight explores questions of memory, suicide, war, and love . . .and the ways our lives become ensnared forever in the moments we can't escape.
