Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Monuments of Paris

The Monuments of Paris

Huisman, Violaine

Hardcover

General FictionHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $28.00

ISBN10: 0593833767
ISBN13: 9780593833766
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: Apr 14 2026
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.84
Height: 0.86 Width: 6.25 Depth: 9.29
Language: English
Named a Best Book of 2026 So Far by The New Yorker

Violaine Huisman explores and contests the myths surrounding the great men of her family, using fiction where the official archives fall silent. The Monuments of Paris is a moving elegy for her accomplished, mercurial, outrageous father--and a beautiful act of disobedience. --Ben Lerner, author of Transcription and The Topeka School

In Violaine Huisman's captivating novel, the real monuments of Paris are not its buildings, but its people--a grand, multigenerational family saga, blending the history of France with intimate personal narratives. --Anne Berest, author of The Postcard

A remarkable novel drawn from life about a Frenchwoman's efforts to come to terms with the legacy of her father and grandfather, powerful forces who left a mark on their country's culture but whose incorrigible womanizing also left a complex mark on their wives and children

Violaine Huisman grew up in Paris with her beautiful, bipolar mother --the subject of Huisman's acclaimed debut novel The Book of Mother --and her iconoclastic, flamboyant father, whose self-dramatization made him a formidable raconteur and a questionable parent. The one constant in her father's personal narrative was his obsession with his childhood during the Vichy regime in France and of his father Georges, long dead, a Belgian Jew whose heroic and tragic biography had taken on the trappings of family myth. In The Monuments of Paris, Huisman transforms these complex layers of history into a moving fiction about exile and belonging, about the lies families are built on and the truths they hold dear.

As the novel opens, Violaine returns to Paris from her adopted home of New York City to visit her dying father for the last time. And as he once again tells the story of his father's rise and fall during the Second World War, Violaine becomes herself obsessed with this myth of her grandfather Georges--and with the nearly erased story of the most significant of his many mistresses, a beautiful and aristocratic woman named Choute, who bears a strange resemblance to her own mother. With the help of a local historian, she sets out to hunt down the truth as it might be known, and in so doing creates the necessary and deeply compelling fiction that is this singular book.

In prose as elegant as it is precise, The Monuments of Paris draws a haunting portrait of twentieth-century France through the outsized ambitions, infidelities, and tragedies of the author's own family, both real and imagined.

Also from

Huisman, Violaine

View All

Also in

Literary Fiction

View All