A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 A Waterstones Best History Book of 2024 Pick '
Kuper is a shrewd observer [in] this entertaining mix of memoir and anthropology ' The Sunday
Times From the bestselling author of Chums comes an explorer's tale of a naïf getting to
understand a complex glittering beautiful and often cruel city. Simon Kuper has
experienced Paris both as a human being and as a journalist. He has grown middle-aged there
eaten the croissants taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday
mornings in the city's notorious banlieues and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on
his family's neighbourhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian
himself Kuper has watched the city change. This century Paris has globalised gentrified
and been shocked into realising its role as the crucible of civilisational conflict. Sometimes
it's a multicultural paradise and sometimes it isn't. This decade Parisians have lived
through a sequence of shocks: terrorist attacks record floods and heatwaves the burning of
Notre Dame the storming of the city by gilets jaunes and the pandemic. Now as the Olympics
come to town France is busy executing the 'Grand Paris' project: the most serious attempt yet
to knit together the bejewelled city with its neglected suburbs. This is a captivating memoir
of today's Paris without the clichés.
