**SHORTLISTED FOR THE HAYES & JARVIS FICTION WITH A SENSE OF PLACE, 2018 EDWARD STANFORD TRAVEL WRITING AWARD** A PRIMA BEST READ OF 2017 This is not the Paris you know... 'It'll open your heart and your mind. It certainly did mine' The Pool On a hot June day, grief-stricken Edward arrives in Paris hoping that a stay in a friend's empty apartment will help him mend. But this is not the Paris he knows: there are no landmarks or grand boulevards, and the apartment he was promised is little more than an attic room. In the apartments below him, his new neighbours fill their flats with secrets. A young mother is on the brink, a bookshop owner buries her past, and a banker takes up a dark and malicious new calling. Before he knows it, Edward will find himself entangled in their web, and as the summer heat intensifies so do tensions within and without the building, leading to a city-wide wave of violence, and a reckoning within the walls of number 37. 'Confident and brilliant. She will immerse you in a world I dare you to turn away from.' Lisa O'Donnell, author of The Death of Bees

Author Biography

Fran Cooper grew up in London before reading English at Cambridge and Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She spent three years in Paris writing a PhD about travelling eighteenth-century artists, and currently works in the curatorial department of a London museum. These Dividing Walls is her first novel.