A remarkable novel drawn from life about a Frenchwoman’s efforts to come to terms with the legacy of her father and grandfather, both powerful forces who left a mark on their country’s culture but whose incorrigible womanizing also left a complex mark on their wives and children. Violaine Huisman grew up in Paris with her beautiful, often hospitalized, manic-depressive mother--the subject of Huisman''s acclaimed debut novel As the novel opens, “Violaine” returns to Paris from her adopted home of New York City to visit her dying father for the last time. And as his conversation once again obsessively circles the story of his father’s rise and fall during the war, Violaine, who always felt herself and her mother to be exiles within their own clan, becomes herself obsessed with this myth of her grandfather Georges – and especially with the nearly erased story of the most significant of his many mistresses, a beautiful and aristocratic woman named Choute. With the help of a local historian, she sets out to hunt down the truth as it might be known, and in so doing creates the necessary and deeply compelling fiction that is this singular book. In prose as elegant as it is precise, <The Monuments of Paris <draws a haunting portrait of twentieth-century France through the outsized ambitions, infidelities, and tragedies of the author’s own family, both real and imagined....

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Violaine Huisman