Paris In the Present Tense

In a single year spanning 2014 to 2015, Jules Lacour – cellist, widower, veteran of the war in Algeria, child of the Holocaust – experiences the compression of all the themes of his life as they grow in intensity and drama until fused together in a dénouement that comports with his deepest loyalties and the highest principles of the music he plays as a maître at Paris-Sorbonne. In the chaos, dissolution, and the continuing glory that is France, he must find a balance between his particularly strong obligations to the past and the attractions and beauties of life and love in the present.

The fluid interweaving– of youth and age; of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in France;of crime and accident, pursuit and evasion; the memory of women he has loved and the irresistible vitality and attraction of those in the present; of fraud and selflessness; of doubt,courage, and sacrifice – unfurls past and present in Paris, Rheims, Saint-Germain-en-Laye,Algeria, Greece, Los Angeles, and New York, with a near hypnotic sense of time and place unmatched in contemporary fiction. The reader is transported to the world of this book as the profound themes that are its lasting heart are carried effortlessly on a structure of superb prose and increasing suspense.