Paris Echo

Does an understanding of history and a deep cultural awareness help us to live a better, richer and more useful life? Or is it just as good to rely on the internet for data and to live only in the moment?Set in 2006, Paris Echo follows Hannah, a 31-year-old American post-doctoral researcher looking into the lives of women during the German Occupation of Paris in 1940-44; and Tariq, a 19-year-old boy who has run away from his home in Morocco, searching for sex and adventure.Through their culture clash we are taken back into the hidden Paris of the Dark Years, the Algerian war and the simmering discontents of the Banlieue. This is not the Paris of croissants and little bistros. This is a haunted city of injustice and bad faith, of ghettos and betrayal. As both characters fight to preserve their integrity and their sanity, they find their future shaped by the lives of the dead, by the ghosts of the Paris Metro.Here is Paris as you have never seen it before – a city in which every building seems to hold the echo of an unacknowledged past, the shadows of Vichy and Algeria.American postdoctoral researcher Hannah and runaway Moroccan teenager Tariq have little in common, yet both are susceptible to the daylight ghosts of Paris. Hannah listens to the extraordinary witness of women who were present under the German Occupation; in her desire to understand their lives, and through them her own, she finds a city bursting with clues and connections. Out in the migrant suburbs, Tariq is searching for a mother he barely knew. For him in his innocence, each boulevard, Métro station and street corner is a source of surprise.In this urgent and deeply moving novel, Faulks deals with questions of empire, grievance and identity. With great originality and a dark humour, Paris Echo asks how much we really need to know if we are to live a valuable life.