Q&A with Mamta Chaudhry, author of HAUNTING PARIS

We had a wonderful time with Mamta Chaudhry, author of HAUNTING PARIS, a timeless story of love and loss takes a mysterious turn when a bereaved pianist discovers a letter among her late lover’s possessions, launching her into a decades-old search for a child who vanished in the turbulence of wartime Paris.

In addition to a well-attended reading and booksigning, we had the opportunity to ask Mamta a few questions:

Q: What was the genesis of this novel?

A: HAUNTING PARIS is above all a love letter to the City of Light. Many of the scenes take place in and around Notre Dame; but when I visited the Deportation Memorial behind the cathedral, I became aware of the darker side of the city’s history. So the love letter became as complicated, layered, and heartbreaking as love can often be.

Q: In a manner of speaking, Paris gets top billing in your novel, how does the city as a character play into the themes and ideas you’re exploring in the novel?

A: That is so perceptive . . . Paris is indeed a character in the novel, and the double entendre in the title refers to a city that is both haunting and haunted. The ghosts of history accompany you as you walk the cobblestone streets, especially on Île Saint-Louis. I’m always fascinated by the long shadow of the past upon the present. The story is set in 1989, when Paris is celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution that resulted in the glorious motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” But it also leads us back to Nazi occupation, a time when the city singularly failed to live up to that promise.

Q: This is your debut novel, do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

A: Although HAUNTING PARIS is my first novel to be published, it’s certainly not the first one I’ve written. So my advice is, don’t give up. Write more, write better. If your story is important enough for you to keep at it, sooner or later it will find its way into the world.

Q: What are you reading and recommending?

A: Although I’m mostly drawn to fiction, I was gripped by a couple of non-fiction books recently: SAY NOTHING by Patrick Radden Keefe, and EDUCATED by Tara Westover. For fiction, I’ve been enthusiastically recommending Lucia Berlin’s A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN, and Nicholson Baker’s THE ANTHOLOGIST.

Q: What are you working on next, if you don’t mind saying?

A: As they say on Monty Python, “Now for something completely different!” But although the new book is set in a different time, a different place, we take our obsessions wherever we go, so it’s still about love, loss, and forgiveness.