The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography / Graham Robb

Look at maps of pre-Napoleonic Europe and while Germany looks like a meatlover's pizza-- a fantastic creation full of bits of sausagelike city-states, pepperoni principalities, and prociutto protectorates, all on a sea of Hapsburgian mozzarella; France in comparison looks like a homogenous white pizza with not a speck of Speck, a leaf of oregano, or a drop of tomato sauce; it's one color from east to west, north to south.

The Discovery of France proves that the reality behind this cartographic representation was a bit different. Even though France was technically one unified kingdom, later one republic ruled from Paris, the reality was quite different. Regional dialects made it nearly impossible for even very near-lying towns to understand each other. Mapmakers who were sent out by royal decree to chart the hinterlands were regarded with such suspicion that on occasion they were captured by village mobs and at least on one occasion executed. Areas of France were so isolated that they weren’t even aware of the world even a day’s walk away. It seems it was ultimately roads that tied the provinces to the capital and made one country out of France. But before such infrastructure, the rhythms of life in the countryside were very different from what they are today. This is a fascinating history of the early origins of France-- people, cuisine, language, culture. You may be surprised to learn how late the French became civilized.

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Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

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