Explorations in Reading: France - Books about or take place in

Contains alternating chapters that present fictionalized accounts of French artist Paul Gauguin's life after he left his wife and children to paint in Tahiti in 1891, and follows the journey of his grandmother Flora Tristan in 1844 as she toured France campaigning for workers' and women's rights.

Brooklyn teen Andi acts out in her rage and grief over her younger brother's death to the point that she is forced to spend winter break with her estranged father in France; while in Paris, she discovers and becomes obsessed with a journal she finds that belonged to Alexandrine Paradis, an aspiring Parisian actress who lived two centuries earlier and who had a fateful encounter with the doomed French king and his young son.

She is seventeen, a peasant, unschooled, simple as a thumb. But on this morning, she is simply God's arrow, shot across the winterland, brilliant and savage and divine. Unstoppable. It is the fifteenth century, and the tumultuous Hundred Years' War rages on. France is under siege, English soldiers tear through the countryside destroying all who cross their paths, and Charles VII, the uncrowned king, has neither the strength nor the will to rally his army. And in the quiet of her parents' garden in Domrémy, a peasant girl sees a spangle of light and hears a powerful voice speak her name. Jehanne.

Joe Sandilands is back and headed to France where he's scheduled to stay as the guest of a glamourous French war window on her estate. The widow needs Joe's help to support her claim that a shell-shocked soldier suffering from amnesia is actually her husband. The problem is that four other men have identified this soldier differently. As Joe investigates all the claims, he uncovers a cleverly concealed murder committed during the war years. This discovery presents him with an even grater dilemma -- he must not only solve a killing in the past, but avert a tragedy in the future.