The #1 NY Times bestselling author of Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the fantastic War, Mark Helprin reveals a robust, rapturous novel set in a present-day Paris caught between violent unrest and its own well-known, inescapable glories.Seventy-four-year-old Jules Lacour?a maître at Paris-Sorbonne, cellist, widower, veteran from the war in Algeria, and kid from the Holocaust?must find a balance between his strong responsibilities to days gone by as well as the attractions and beauties of life and love in the on the subject of Paris in the Present Tense present.In the midst of what ought to be an effulgent time of life with its days bright with music, family, and rowing over the Seine, Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges to his principles, livelihood, and home, forcing him to grapple with his complex past and discover a means forward.

He dangers fraud to save lots of his terminally sick infant grandson, fits wits with a renegade insurance investigator, is drawn into an work of savage violence, and falls deeply, excitingly in love with a cellist who is a third his age group. Against the backdrop of a perfect and knowing eyesight of Paris and the way it can distinctively shape a life, he forges a denouement that’s staggering in its mankind, style, and truth.In the intoxicating beauty of its prose and emotional amplitude of its storytelling, Mark Helprin’s Paris in the Present Tense is a soaring achievement, a deep, dizzying take a look at a life through the purifying lenses of art and memory.