“There will be no more diaries to fill, now.” How lonely, an emotion that echoes through this book that is sure to be on end-of-year best lists. It opens in present-day London and then flits back and forth between 1945 and present-day Paris, with an opulent city of lights hotel, the Lutetia, as the main setting. The hotel is famous for a painting in the lobby that depicts a woman in rags in one of the rooms; she was one of the many Holocaust survivors housed briefly in the hotel after returning from the horrors of the camps. In the present day, the artist’s granddaughter, memory specialist Dr. Olivia Finn, must quickly head from London to Paris when the hotel calls to say that her grandmother is in the lobby, needing help that she insists only Olivia can provide. Olivia’s grandmother says that she killed a woman at the hotel during those terrible first post-war days; she has dementia, but could her confession be true? Memory and its porousness are central to the plot here. So is the turmoil and moral ambiguity of 1945 Paris: Resistance men who fraternized with Nazis are showered with honors but their women comrades branded “whores,’” while the police work to uncover collaborators attempting to pass as camp survivors. With twists to spare, a fast-moving plot, and piercing looks at what it was like to start over after the war, this is one to get on your TBR list.
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