October 6, 2026
The Paris Files, by Eva Jurczyk
There is darkness when one first enters the apartment building at 44 Rue Oberkampf in Paris’s eleventh arrondissement, which is to say that none of us—neither the characters in Eva Jurczyk’s latest, The Paris Files, nor those of us who are reading—really knows what we’re getting into here. The story, the characters, all of it just off-beat enough to keep surprising at every turn, every twist, and the image that springs to mind is the staircase in the building spiralling up-up-up, the stakes growing ever higher.
It’s the story of Genie, a Canadian woman who meets an American man while she’s travelling in Asia, and they make this plan to meet again in Paris, which sounds incredibly romantic, except that Genie’s best friend is doubtful. Because Genie has been burned before, can come on a bit too strong, wants too much, and she’s close to 40, not some young ingenue. But the American arrives, the best friend is proven wrong, apparently…but not entirely, because the entire novel is told through police interviews. With Genie herself, telephone interviews with the friend Toronto, with the building’s concierge, the neighbours, the grumpy man who sells fruit and vegetables across the street and keeps an eye on everything. Because it seems that not long after the American arrives, he and Genie spending a few love-soaked days together, he suddenly disappears.
Like the staircase, the novel is dizzying, disorienting. Genie is unreliable, characters are keeping secrets, just why the police are interviewing her in the first place isn’t clear. And while the novel’s structure could pose a limitation for lesser writers, Jurczyk’s cool and easy prose style, underlined by a darkly comic approach, brings the story and its characters to life, along with Paris itself (and the food!), and the overall effect is utterly propulsive. What I didn’t know when I was getting into this book was that I’d start reading it on Sunday, and be as close as is humanly possible to being LITERALLY unable to put it down, so that was my day gone, but I couldn’t have spent it better.
A fresh twist on the unhinged female narrator, a story about friendship, travel, duplicity, and real estate, I had high hopes for this novel, but the experience of reading it surpassed all my expectations. It’s out today and you should buy it!
