**SHORTLISTED FOR THE HAYES & JARVIS FICTION WITH A SENSE OF PLACE, 2018 EDWARD STANFORD TRAVEL WRITING AWARD**
A PRIMA BEST READ OF 2017
This is not the Paris you know...
'It'll open your heart and your mind. It certainly did mine' The Pool
On a hot June day, grief-stricken Edward arrives in Paris hoping that a stay in a friend's empty apartment will help him mend. But this is not the Paris he knows: there are no landmarks or grand boulevards, and the apartment he was promised is little more than an attic room.
In the apartments below him, his new neighbours fill their flats with secrets. A young mother is on the brink, a bookshop owner buries her past, and a banker takes up a dark and malicious new calling.
Before he knows it, Edward will find himself entangled in their web, and as the summer heat intensifies so do tensions within and without the building, leading to a city-wide wave of violence, and a reckoning within the walls of number 37.
'Confident and brilliant. She will immerse you in a world I dare you to turn away from.' Lisa O'Donnell, author of The Death of Bees
In a forgotten corner of Paris stands a building.
Within its walls, people talk and kiss, laugh and cry; some are glad to sit alone, while others wish they did not. A woman with silver blonde hair opens her bookshop downstairs, an old man feeds the sparrows on his windowsill, and a young mother wills the morning to hold itself at bay. Though each of their walls touches someone else's, the neighbours they pass in the courtyard remain strangers.
Into this courtyard arrives Edward. Still bearing the sweat of a channel crossing, he takes his place in an attic room to wait out his grief.
But in distant corners of the city, as Paris is pulled taut with summer heat, there are those who meet with a darker purpose. As the feverish metropolis is brought to boiling point, secrets will rise and walls will crumble both within and without number thirty-seven...
A resplendent debut which combines a gracefully multi-layered narrative with insightful social commentary.
