Jean-Philippe Blondel – författare

After decades, former lovers come face to face in a novel filled with a "suspenseful dread that makes you want to turn every page at locomotive pace" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). Cécile, a stylish forty-seven-year-old, has spent the weekend visiting her parents in a provincial town southeast of Paris. By early Monday morning, she''s exhausted. These trips back home are always stressful, and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But it''s soon occupied by a man she instantly recognizes: Philippe Leduc, with whom she had a passionate affair that ended in her brutal humiliation almost thirty years ago. In the fraught hour and a half that ensues, their express train hurtles toward the French capital. Cécile and Philippe undertake their own face-to-face journey—In silence? What could they possibly say to one another?—with the reader gaining entrée to the most private of thoughts. This intense, intimate novel offers "a taut, suspenseful psychological journey from which there is no escape . . . Gripping" (Kati Marton, author of Paris: A Love Story). "Perfectly written and a remarkably suspenseful read . . . Absorbing, intriguing, insightful." —Library Journal (starred review)

A French teacher on the verge of retirement is invited to a glittering opening that showcases the artwork of his former student, who has since become a celebrated painter. This unexpected encounter leads to the older man posing for his portrait. Possibly in the nude. Such personal exposure at close range entails a strange and troubling pact between artist and sitter that prompts both to reevaluate their lives. Blondel, author of the hugely popular novel The 6:41 to Paris, evokes an intimacy of dangerous intensity in a tale marked by profound nostalgia and a reckoning with the past that allows its two characters to move ahead in to the future.

A novel celebrating a magical setting of both encounter and anonymity. At a classic cafe in the French provinces, Jean-Philippe Blondel, author of the bestselling The 6:41 to Paris, presents a moving fresco of intertwined destinies portrayed with humor, insight and tenderness. In less than twenty-four hours, a medley of characters resumes normal life patterns after a long disruption from Covid - a mother and son in heated conversation, a man and his childhood friend with whom he covertly fell in love, and a woman who crosses paths with the ex who abandoned her in Australia seventeen years earlier. The cafe's customers, waiters, and owners past and present, examine the threads of their existence, exposing the reader to their inner selves, their failed dreams and how they envisage moving forward in the uncertain future that awaits us all.