Week 33 Reading (2026) Elizabeth Bowen

I first read Elizabeth Bowen’s 1935 novel The House in Paris so long ago that, when I picked it up again recently, it turns out I only recalled half of the plot. I won’t do a full plot summary because it would require more words than I usually devote to these mini-reviews and it would have to include spoilers. The book is written in two parts, The Present and The Past. In The Present, two young children—eleven-year-old Henrietta and nine-year-old Leopold—find themselves thrown together for most of a day in the Paris house of Naomi Fisher and her dying mother, who lies in bed in an upstairs room. Henrietta is between trains and Leopold is anxiously awaiting the arrival of his mother, who abandoned him shortly after his birth and whom he has never met. Through conversations that Henrietta and Leopold individually have with each of their hosts, the children determine that secrets about Leopold’s past are being withheld from him. In The Past, which takes up the middle half of the book,…