The Paris Thief

For readers of The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, The Paris Library and The Paris Bookseller, a story of love, betrayal and sacrifice. In wartime Paris, a woman is entrusted with saving the Mona Lisa during the Nazi occupation - until her first love walks back into her life now wearing the uniform of the enemy.

She feels the weight of her responsibility, the weight of her secret. With bitter hands, she wraps up the portrait, closes the case and clicks the latches in place.

1910: Eighteen-year-old Mathilde has escaped her lonely provincial childhood to become a painter in Montmartre. Moving in bohemian circles, she models for Picasso and lives hedonistically amongst the artists, writers and intellectuals of Paris. But when the Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre, and a number of Mathilde's friends and lovers become suspects, life will never be the same again.

1940: As the enemy marches into Paris, Mathilde, now an archivist at the Louvre, is tasked with the evacuation of hundreds of priceless masterpieces to the Château de Chambord. With her she carries a secret - the Mona Lisa is now under her sole protection, safe from looters. Nobody must discover its whereabouts. But when a face from her past arrives at the château, dressed in Nazi uniform, Mathilde finds herself agonisingly torn between love and duty . . .

Lisa Rochon is a writer, an award-winning architecture critic, cultural commentator and essayist. She is the two-time winner of a National Newspaper Award for her "City Space" column in The Globe and Mail and the recipient of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada's President's Award for Architectural Journalism. Educated at the University of Toronto and in Paris at Sciences Po and École du Louvre, she is passionate about seeing the world afresh and with new complexity through female eyes. Rochon splits her time between Toronto and Europe. Her first novel, Tuscan Daughter, was a bestseller in Canada.