NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
"If one were to cross Jane Austen and Henry James, the result would be Diane Johnson."--San Francisco Chronicle

The national bestseller and inspiration for the major motion picture starring Naomi Watts and Kate Hudson
Called "stylish... refreshing... genuinely wise" by The New York Times Book Review, this delightful comedy of manners and morals, money, marriage, and murder follows smart, sexy, and impeccably dressed American Isabel Walker as she lands in Paris to visit her stepsister Roxy, a poet whose marriage to an...

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
"A nearly flawless performance--a beautifully constructed, elegantly written book, delicate in its perceptions, powerful in its impact."--New York Times
The riveting story of four crucial days in the lives of four people sharing a rambling Victorian house, "lying low" and harboring secrets not meant to be shared
Theo Wait, a middle-aged former ballet dancer, and her brother, Anton, have taken in two boarders: beautiful Lynn, who never receives mail or visitors; and energetic and effusive Ouida, a Brazilian student and illegal alien...

-Johnson is more droll than Henry James, to whom she's been compared, and she's as witty as a modern-day Voltaire. Vraiment, L'Affaire, c'est irresistible ---Publishers Weekly
Amy Hawkins, a Palo Alto girl who made herself a dot-com fortune, goes to France to get a sheen of sophistication and, perhaps, to have an affair that will ruffle her all-too-steady heart. She starts her quest in a glamorous resort in the French Alps, amid an assortment of aristocrats and ski enthusiasts. But when two of the hotel's guests are swept away by an avalanche, Adrian's...

"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion." A summer evening's ghost stories, lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine's room, and a runaway imagination--fired by philosophical discussions with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley about science, galvanism, and the origins of life--conspired to produce for Marry Shelley this haunting night specter. By morning, it had become the germ of her...

Isabel arrives in Paris to find that her sister's French husband has just walked out, leaving her sister pregnant. While she finds herself seduced by gourmet food, antiques and older men, her sister's marriage disintegrates into wrangles over money in this social comedy.

Beautifully written and refreshingly original makes us see Paris] in a different light. -- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
Swapping his native San Francisco for the City of Light, travel writer David Downie arrived in Paris in 1986 on a one-way ticket, his head full of romantic notions. Curiosity and the legs of a cross-country runner propelled him daily from an unheated, seventh-floor walk-up garret near the Champs-Elysees to the old Montmartre haunts of the doomed painter Modigliani, the tombs of Pere-Lachaise cemetery, the luxuriant alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens...