Another Book of Note

[rfmcdonald]

Shortly after I finished Brian Moore's two novels, I read Lisa Appagianesi's excellent Paris Requiem. Set in the Paris of the Third Republic at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, this well-written book is at once a thriller and a murder mystery and a meditation on the nature of modernity. In the characters' joys and sorrows, in Paris' technological marvels and dark eugenical biology, in the social fabric of a city that finds itself the meeting point for diverse streams of immigrants and new modes of sexual and gender behaviour, we see a society not too different from our own. A fantastic read.