Bøger af Jean-Philippe Blondel

A French teacher on the verge of retirement is invited to a glittering opening that showcases the artwork of his former student, who has since become a celebrated painter. This unexpected encounter leads to the older man posing for his portrait. Possibly in the nude. Such personal exposure at close range entails a strange and troubling pact between artist and sitter that prompts both to reevaluate their lives. Blondel, author of the hugely popular novel The 6:41 to Paris, evokes an intimacy of dangerous intensity in a tale marked by profound nostalgia and a reckoning with the past that allows its two characters to move ahead in to the future.

After decades, former lovers come face to face in a novel filled with a ';suspenseful dread that makes you want to turn every page at locomotive pace' (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). Cecile, a stylish forty-seven-year-old, has spent the weekend visiting her parents in a provincial town southeast of Paris. By early Monday morning, she's exhausted. These trips back home are always stressful, and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But it's soon occupied by a man she instantly recognizes: Philippe Leduc, with whom she had a passionate affair that ended in her brutal humiliation almost thirty years ago. In the fraught hour and a half that ensues, their express train hurtles toward the French capital. Cecile and Philippe undertake their own face-to-face journeyIn silence? What could they possibly say to one another?with the reader gaining entree to the most private of thoughts. This intense, intimate novel offers ';a taut, suspenseful psychological journey from which there is no escape... Gripping' (Kati Marton, author of Paris: A Love Story). ';Perfectly written and a remarkably suspenseful read... Absorbing, intriguing, insightful.' Library Journal (starred review)