A stunning historical novel of post-war Paris that interweaves a coming-of-age story a
cross-cultural romance and a portrait of the international youth at a definitive moment in
contemporary history Paris 1947. The city recovering from the war is brimming with young
international students – African Indochinese Arab as well as American and French – balancing
on the precipice of a new world. Cecile Rosenbaum a young Jewish girl quickly developing her
own intellectual and political ideals meets Minette – a feisty French-born girl of Senegalese
descent – on the bus to a Communist Youth Conference. There she meets and begins to fall in
love with Seb who arrived from West Africa with his sister at just seven years old. As Seb
toils for the exams that will permit him to study French architecture at the Parisian
university Beaux-Arts he also begins to dig into his roots in Dahomey the West African
kingdom where he came from. Cecile struggles at her job at the Louvre clashes with her white
Jewish family and reckons with her memories of a childhood under Nazi occupation and her
fierce dedication to her new political ideologies. Seb and Cecile find themselves entangled
and along the course of the novel they lose and find each other again – in the corners of jazz
clubs at a Louis Armstrong concert in the square where Seb’s exam scores will be posted and
finally at a protest that turns shockingly violent. Nuanced powerful and sharply realized
The New Internationals is a brilliant work of historical fiction that celebrates the awakening
of the post-colonial movements of the 20th century and international youth population in Paris
who rose up – and came together – in the beginnings of a vibrant political moment.
