Historical Fiction · Free kit
Last Twilight in Paris
London, 1953: Louise Burns, settling into postwar domestic life, finds a heart-pendant necklace in a Henley-on-Thames secondhand shop — in a box stamped with the Paris department store Lévitan. She recognizes it from Red Cross work in Nazi-occupied Europe and from her friend Franny, who acquired it in Germany shortly before dying in a suspicious car strike. Louise travels to Paris with help from former boss Ian — and their unfinished romance — to trace the jewel through Lévitan’s true history as a glamorous store turned Nazi prison where Jewish prisoners sorted plunder from Jewish homes. In the wartime timeline, young Jewish Parisian Helaine Weil defies her parents to marry a musician, only to be imprisoned at Lévitan and torn from her husband; she entrusts the necklace to Franny on the eve of catastrophe. Jenoff braids mystery, female friendship, and resistance around a little-known occupation site inspired by real history.
“Some doors in Paris still look like fashion — until you learn what happened behind the display windows.”
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