Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present…

“AN EVENING WITH MAMTA CHAUDHRY & RUSSELL BANKS”

Mamta Chaudhry’s debut novel, Haunting Paris, has been praised as
“elegantly wrought,” by The New York Times and “a heart-wrenching love letter to Paris" by Publishers Weekly.  Our own Mitchell Kaplan calls it “so fresh, so musical and so moving.” Mamta lives in Coral Gables, and she and her husband spend part of each year in France.  The internationally acclaimed author of Cloudsplitter and Continental Drift, Russell Banks divides his time between upstate New York and Miami. The two writers sit down to chat about Haunting Paris, and the dark days of Nazi occupation during World War II that continue to haunt the City of Light.

Paris, 1989:  Alone in her luminous apartment on Île Saint-Louis, Sylvie discovers a mysterious letter among her late lover Julien’s possessions, launching her into a decades-old search for a child who vanished in the turbulence of the Second World War. She is unaware that she is watched over by Julien’s ghost, his love for her powerful enough to draw him back to this world, though doomed now to remain a silent observer.  Sylvie’s quest leads her deep into the secrets of Julien’s past, shedding new light on the dark days of Nazi-occupied Paris. A timeless story of love and loss, Haunting Paris matches emotional intensity with lyrical storytelling to explore grief, family secrets, and the undeniable power of memory.

MAMTA CHAUDHRY‘s fiction, poetry, and feature articles have been published in the Miami Review, The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Telegraph, The Statesman, Writer’s Digest, and The Rotarian, among other publications. Much of her professional career was spent in television and classical radio at stations in Calcutta, Gainesville, Dallas, and Miami. She lives with her husband in Coral Gables, Florida, and they spend part of each year in India and France. Haunting Paris is her first novel.

RUSSELL BANKS, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He lives in upstate New York and Miami, Florida.

A Virtual Evening with Mamta Chaudhry and Russell Banks