THE RAIN WATCHER

Paris is in chaos. Relentless rain is pushing the Seine out of its banks and into homes, museums and train stations. Photographer Linden Malegarde would know how to deal with this if he was on assignment.

But Linden isn’t in Paris for work. He’s here to mark his parents’ wedding anniversary and get through the weekend without a scene. All that changes when his father suffers a stroke. Now Linden has to lead his fractious family through their crisis as the city around them reels. As everything teeters, Linden glimpses the chance of a reconciliation he thought impossible. Tatiana de Rosnay again mines the past to deliver a powerful tale of people caught up in major moments in history. De Rosnay is so good at this storytelling that I wish she had focused on her family/flood narrative. Her decision to intersperse a decades-old mystery adds little but distraction. My advice to readers would be to skip the italics sections and savour the story of her beloved city on the brink.