Showing results by author "Paul La Farge" in All Categories

Baron Georges-Eughne Haussmann was the architect of modern Paris. In two decades, from 1853 to 1869, he transformed the cramped, filthy lanes of the medieval city into the airy boulevards and green parks of today. Yet there is a story that, on his deathbed, Haussmann wished to undo everything he'd built. "Would that it had died with me!" he is supposed to have said. What is the secret of the baron's last regret?

In September 2000, a young programmer comes home from a desert festival to learn that his grandfather has died and that he has to return to Thebes - a town which is so isolated that its inhabitants have their own language - in order to clean out the house where his family lived for five generations. While he’s there, he runs into Yesim, a Turkish American woman whom he loved as a child, and begins a romance in which past and present are dangerously confused.