These Dividing Walls

Author/Guide: Fran Cooper

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2018

ISBN: 978-1473641532
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

In a forgotten corner of Paris stands a building.

Within its walls, life unfolds. 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. He moves into 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 37…

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Paris

“Far back on the LEft Bank, there is a secret quarter. Beyond the neon-lit slopes of Montparnasse, the winding cobbles of the firth arrondisement, a warren of quiet streets lie sandwiched between boulevards. Little traffic comes through here.

Number thirty- seven sits at the meeting of two streets on this forgotten corner of the city. It is much like the buildings that surround it – late nineteenth-century, pale stone. But for it’s turquoise door it might slip from view altogether.”

There are lots of nooks and crannies in this tightly packed city and at night, you can see inside the homes of people going about their daily business. What do you know about who lives behind these windows and how well do you know your neighbours? “For what building doesn’t have secrets?”

There are even secrets underground in this area of Paris – the catacombs for example is a series of caverns filled with skeletons from many years ago. There are eerie secrets buried in all kinds of place in Paris!

Booktrailer Review

Susan:@thebooktrailer

An apartment in Paris filled with people from all corner of the globe – now I’ve lived in such a place and didn’t know my neighbours either – that planted the seed for wanting to see behind the closed doors of this apartment block!
There’s something delicious about peaking behind the curtains (or lack of as is the case in France) and seeing what people get up to. There’s the curious in all of us and this is a fascinating insight into a multicultural French society.
Crime and trouble is known to become worse when the heat of the summer gets worse, and this is no exception. Paris is having problems – there is racial tension on the streets and protests of all descriptions. When a muslim family moved into the building, I felt a prickle of nerves as this was becoming very poignant and relevant to what’s going on in the world today.
There’s not much to be said other than you have to read it and go on the journey with these people to see, experience living in a Paris apartment and a city undergoing turmoil in every sense of the word.
I found the ‘afterword really interesting as this illustrates how life carried on after the riots and turmoil of the summer