The House in Paris

The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen. First UK edition. First impression from 1935 in VG condition. The pages are remarkably clean, binding is firm. There is minor spotting to the page block. The jacket has had some professional restoration to the bottom of the spine along with some wear to extremities. 

 

About The House in Paris from Penguin

This is one of Bowen’s most artful as well as psychologically acute novels. The House in Paris is a timeless masterpiece of nuance and atmosphere, and also represents the very best of Bowen’s celebrated oeuvre. When eleven year old Henrietta arrives at the Fishers’ well appointed house in Paris, she is prepared to spend her day between trains looked after by an old friend of her grandmother’s. Henrietta longs to see a few sights in the foreign city; little does she know what fascinating secrets the Fisher house itself contains. For Henrietta finds that her visit coincides with that of Leopold, an intense child who has come to Paris to be introduced to the mother he has never known. In the course of a single day, the relations between Leopold, Henrietta’s agitated hostess Naomi Fisher, Leopold’s mysterious mother, his dead father, and the dying matriarch in bed upstairs, come to light slowly and tantalizingly. Then when Henrietta leaves the house that evening, it is in possession of the kind of grave knowledge usually reserved only for adults.