Synopses & Reviews
A moody, sumptuous debut novel set in 1990s Paris Matilde Anselm, professor of cardiac anesthesiology, arrives in Paris from New York to be part of a surgery team in the winter of 1990, as manifestations against the First Gulf War are raging in the streets. Even as her concerns mount over the shadowy protocols surrounding the planned heart transplant, and even as she falls in love with the Arab diplomat in charge of those protocols, a surprise inheritance—a mysterious Paris apartment and a trove of love letters from the Spanish Civil War, bequeathed to her by a stranger—sweep her through a hidden Paris and into the labyrinth of her own buried past.
As the diplomat and the apartment reluctantly reveal their secrets, the tragedies they unearth open a further mystery, the enigma that has haunted Matildes life. In the end she is left devastated, liberated, and, for the very first time, herself.
Paris Twilight grapples with the meaning of love, the sin of suicide, and the mystery of family in a masterful fiction debut, a dizzying tale of personal transformation.
Review
"Ward Just has finally returned to Washington, his richest mine of fictional ore. This he transmutes into a potent multi-generational narrative, deploying techniques he has perfected over a generation of experiment. In a prologue rivaling any of Balzac's, Just infuses a rich historical and architectural particularity with metaphors invented and placed to suggest the essence of what follows: not only the motivation, contours, and meaning of events, but the plight of characters, who can neither escape the world of power they have embraced nor overcome their arrogant self-delusion. Like Edith Wharton, Just displays this world as a closed, dense, but imperfectly integrated culture, isolated from its dependencies and tragically narcissistic. Unlike Balzac or Wharton, however, Just dispenses with the full telling of his story, and zeros in on key, often widely separated dialogues in which his creatures choose, ventilate and rationalize, or tortuously reflect. The reader must reconstruct intervening actions, passions, and thought from the narrator's references—or from the characters' remembrance and commentary, which are frequently limited or unreliable. Hence the dust jacket copy is ludicrously wrong: Echo House is anything but a 'huge, sprawling, panoramic epic about dubious deeds in high places.' Instead, it is the highly distilled, introspective account of a flawed collective moral disposition, its tangled causes and its checkered effects. Echo House is also the masterwork of Ward Just's late maturity." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review
"A major work by a first-rate American writer."
Review
"A major work by a first-rate American writer." The Washington Post
Synopsis
A FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
"Will be read in a century's time be anyone seeking to understand how we lived."--Detroit Free Press
"A master American novelist." --Vanity Fair
An epic chronicle of three generations of Washington power brokers and the women who loved them (except when they didn't), Echo House is Ward Just's masterpiece. The Washington Post described it as "a fascinating if ultimately painful fairy tale, complete with a family curse. The decline of the Behls represents the decline of Washington from the bright dawn of the American century into the gathering shadows of an alien new millennium."
Synopsis
A FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD "Will be read in a century's time be anyone seeking to understand how we lived."--Detroit Free Press "A master American novelist." --Vanity Fair An epic chronicle of three generations of Washington power brokers and the women who loved them (except when they didn't), Echo House is Ward Just's masterpiece. The Washington Post described it as "a fascinating if ultimately painful fairy tale, complete with a family curse. The decline of the Behls represents the decline of Washington from the bright dawn of the American century into the gathering shadows of an alien new millennium."
Synopsis
Here is Just's masterpiece - an epic chronicle of three generations of Washington power brokers and the womenfolk who loved them (except when they didn't). The Washington Post described this book as "a fascinating if ultimately painful fairy tale, complete with a family curse. The decline of the Behls represents the decline of Washington from the bright dawn of the American century into the gathering shadows of an alien new millennium."
Synopsis
A debut thriller of personal transformation: By the time Matilde Anselm, an American physician in Paris to help with a heart transplant, begins to fear she may instead be a party to murder, she's also fallen in love, inherited a mysterious Paris apartment, and discovered she's not who she thought she was.
About the Author
Ward Just is the author of fourteen previous novels, including the National book Award finalist Echo House and An Unfinished Season, winner of the Chicago Tribunes Heartland Award. In a career that began as a war correspondent for Newsweek and the Washington Post, Just has lived and written in half a dozen countries, including Britain, France, and Vietnam. His characters often lead public lives as politicians, civil servants, soldiers, artists, and writers. It is the tension between public duty and private conscience that animates much of his fiction, including Forgetfulness. Just and his wife, Sarah Catchpole, divide their time between Marthas Vineyard and Paris.