Fictional Paris

When you’re choosing your Paris hotel, you might like to bear in mind that it may be just next door to a house where Ernest Hemingway stayed, the café where Sartre wrote, or a restaurant where Julia Child picked up a great recipe. For the price of a few minutes on the internet you can pick up one of the great hotel deals in Paris and within a short time, find yourself right in the heart of literary Paris.
Almost French, by Sarah Turnbull is a new twist on the travel memoir. Sarah meets a Frenchman while she is backpacking round Europe and on impulse accepts his invitation to visit him for a week in Paris. Eight years later they are married and she’s still there. From your Paris hotel, you may not need to look for a job, manage a dinner party, or deal with grim-faced officialdom, but you’ll find Sarah’s story of how she became ‘Almost French’ a delightful read.
Murder in Montmartre by Cara Black sees the intrepid Aimee Leduc striving to clear the name of a childhood friend, who's charged with shooting her partner to death. Aimee knows the solution to proving Laure's innocence lies somewhere in the hilltop maze of the seedy Montmartre neighbourhood. These days, Montmartre is one of the most interesting and intriguing part of the city, with many eccentric café’s, shops and bars and you can find some of the best value hotels in Paris here.
A Moveable Feast is one of Ernest Hemingway’s best known and best loved books. It’s a set of memoirs about his years in Paris as part of a circle of expatriate American writers in the 1920s. Many of the sights of Paris star in this book, as do some great literary and artistic names, such as Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Hilaire Belloc, Pascin, John Dos Passos, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. So why not take the opportunity to make a Paris hotel booking now, and revel in the world of great 1920s literary society.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery is one of recent years’ surprise best sellers. Renee is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building on the Left Bank. To the residents she is honest, reliable and uncultivated - an ideal concierge. But Renee has a secret. Beneath this conventional façade she is more truly cultured than many of her self-important employers. Then the death of one of their privileged neighbours brings dramatic change to everyone at number 7, Rue de Grenelle, altering the course of their lives forever. So when you get to your Paris hotel, be sure to check out the concierge, she may not be all she seems.
For the ultimate, pick out any of Victor Hugo’s novels which very often showcase the dark side of this fabulous city. Murders in the Rue Morgue, Les Misérables or the unforgettable Hunchback of Notre Dame, really require no introduction.
These are just a few of the great books inspired by Paris, why not pick up a copy of any one of them, find yourself a great hotel deal in Paris and settle down to experience the City the way the great writers, past and present, do.