This is Graham Robb's superb follow-up to his 2007 book The Discovery of France, which won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. No one knows a city like the people who live there—so who better to relate the history of Paris than its inhabitants through the ages? Taking us from 1750 and the first rumblings of the French Revolution to the suburban riots of the new millennium, Parisians can be read from cover to cover or dipped into at leisure.
"A collection of true stories, culled from Robb's insatiable historical reading and lit by his imagination.... So richly pleasurable that you feel it might emit a warm glow if you left it in a dark room."—Sunday Times (London), Book of the Week
"Comparable to Peter Ackroyd's masterpiece London: A Biography.... Though Paris is perhaps the most described city in the world, Robb's strange and pungent vignettes tell us something new.... The author's lustrous prose and flair for narrative mean that this book resembles nothing so much as a grand episodic novel, packed with a splendid cast and studded with bravura set pieces."—Independent (London)