I'm a couple of pages behind on reading the thread so will do my review then go back and catch up :)
4. Paris Echo, Sebastian Faulks
This is set in modern day Paris and follows two alternating protagonists: Hannah, an American historian who is returning rather trepidatiously to Paris after having her heart broken there 10 years before, and Tariq, a bored Moroccan teenager who runs away to Paris searching for - well, I'm not sure what and nor is he.
Tariq ends up as Hannah's lodger, and while they are rarely in the same space at the same time, their stories weave around one another. Hannah is researching the lives of women during the German Occupation, while Tariq, who has become bored and detached at school, is fascinated by the historic names of streets and metro stations as he explores the different areas of the city. Soon it seems that they are both becoming obsessed with voices and faces from the past.
This is an ambitious novel which weaves together a rich and evocative depiction of modern-day Paris with its grand buildings, run-down housing estates, tourists and kebab shops, with painful stories from the not-too-distant past, layering and interweaving these in what seemed to me (as an outside observer) to be a sensitive manner.
I've thought before that Faulks doesn't really do women well, and Hannah, both in her actions and in her inner narrative, definitely reads to me like a woman written by a middle-aged man (albeit a middle-aged man who is good at what he does). Tariq is great, however, and the "extracts" from the wartime stories of the women that Hannah reads are, for me, much more effective than Hannah's own part of the story.