Dear Librarian,
When I first started writing books, I set my stories in libraries; the spaces where I’ve spent the majority of my time for the last fifteen years. By day, I’m an academic librarian, by night, I’ve written novels about the dangers that lurk in among all those books.
It’s scary to step out of the stacks, but I’m excited to go on this journey with all of you. This new book is about leaving the familiar and diving headfirst into the unknown. Even if it’s scary. Even if it’s ill-advised.
A few years ago, my best friend did something I’d never be brave enough to do. She took a year off from her life for a trip around the world. With her thirties and a few brutal breakups behind her, she wanted adventure, food, solitude. And so, predictably, almost as soon as she started her trip, she met a man. He was younger, he was handsome, he was charming, he was . . . too good to be true?
How fun would it be, I thought, to write a love story about two strangers who meet while they’re both on trips around the world? They plan a rendezvous in Paris, they fall madly in love, and then one morning, the perfect man disappears. In The Paris Files, the reader is as befuddled as the lovesick protagonist. Was she ghosted by the man of her dreams? Or is something more sinister going on?
The story I wrote for you is about the exhausting farce of modern relationships, it’s about unreliable narrators, about friendships that traverse oceans and the communities that spring up among people who live in close proximity to each other. But most of all, it’s about Paris.
Reading this book you’ll get to visit my favorite boulangerie on Rue Oberkampf, my beloved Bastille Market where a farmer will sell you perfect morels, but only when they’re in season. You’ll wander down the narrow streets of the Marais and duck into the bookshop next to the Marche des Enfants Rouge.
It’s a tough time to be a librarian, but it’s as rewarding as ever. It’s through books that I was first inspired to travel. Long before I was lucky enough to visit Paris in person, I followed Madeline around the city, feasted with Julia Child, and sat among writers with Sylvia Beach. And it was so often a librarian who put those books in my hands. Librarians are tour guides who hold the whole world at their fingertips, and I’m thrilled at the prospect of adding my book to your collection.
Thank you so much for reading,
Eva
