A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

A young woman follows the man she loves to Paris and finds, amid the wildness of Second Empire luxury and treachery, many loves to win and lose. She must also find a way to a life she can truly call her own.

"An arresting tale of what it meant to survive as a woman . . . [and] an unflinching portrait of love and loss against a landscape of Parisian decadence.”—Deborah Harkness

“Epic times make for epic books . . . Wonderful, suspenseful reading.”—Karen Joy Fowler

"Eugénie R. is every girl in a daguerreotype looking over her shoulder, every woman with a baby hurrying away from you down a gas-lit street, and then too, she is the first of her kind, a woman who stands at her own barricades and fights a France determined to render her silent. I lost myself whole-heartedly in her story, and would have followed her down any narrow alley, into any candlelit room, just to know what happened, to stay back there and to delay coming home."—Sarah Blake

“Fiction in the grand tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy.”—Howard Frank Mosher

"Lord! How beautifully this is written. How rare that is to discover."—Dorothy Allison