Twenty-two-year-old Catrine arrives in Paris, the city she’s dreamed of since childhood, and it speaks back—but not in ways she expected. Drifting through the streets of 1981 Paris, the voices of French writers she once read in solitude whisper back, intimate and insistent. Rather than reassure her, they unsettle her, exposing cracks in the person she believed herself to be.

When a brief romance ends in abrupt eviction, Catrine is left broke and unmoored, suspended between a city that won't release her and a past she refuses to reclaim. An unlikely friendship with a widowed Sorbonne professor leads to an impulsive road trip to Normandy and everything begins to unravel. What follows is not the Paris she expected, but something more unsettling—and more honest.

Is the City of Light rescuing her, haunting her, or revealing something she's been too afraid to see?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marianne C. Bohr is a published author and award-winning essayist with a lifelong weakness for faraway places. A former travel blogger for The Huffington Post, she married her high school sweetheart—now her favorite travel partner—and they have been hitting the road together ever since. Her first book, Gap Year Girl: A Baby Boomer Adventure Across 21 Countries, grew out of a yearlong sabbatical she and her husband spent wandering across Europe. Her second, The Twenty: One Woman’s Trek Across Corsica on the GR20 Trail, chronicles hiking across Europe’s toughest footpath. Marianne recently finished a coming-of-age novel, When Paris Whispers, which takes place in France. It will be published in September 2026.
After years in publishing and teaching middle school French, Marianne now lives in Park City, Utah, with her ski-instructor husband, where she skis, hikes, and writes—sometimes all in the same day.