What is Beatrice Colin reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Beatrice Colin, author of To Capture What We Cannot Keep.

Her entry begins:

Exposure (2016) by Helen Dunmore

I’m a big fan of Helen Dunmore and have been for years. I love her pared down, poetic prose and clever twists. I met her once at an event and we walked around Winchester Cathedral together. She impressed me further when she looked down at the 12th century Winchester Bible in its glass case and translated the Latin. Anyway, set in England in the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, this novel explores what happens to a young family when caught up in the fringes of an espionage ring. Drawing links with the Jewish experience in Germany in the 1930s, it captures how easily the security of middle-class domesticity can be pulled from below and how one mother goes on to rebuild her life. Like all the best tales, this is a love story with...[read on]

About To Capture What We Cannot Keep, from the publisher:

Set against the construction of the Eiffel Tower, this novel charts the relationship between a young Scottish widow and a French engineer who, despite constraints of class and wealth, fall in love.

In February 1887, Caitriona Wallace and Émile Nouguier meet in a hot air balloon, floating high above Paris, France--a moment of pure possibility. But back on firm ground, their vastly different social strata become clear. Cait is a widow who because of her precarious financial situation is forced to chaperone two wealthy Scottish charges. Émile is expected to take on the bourgeois stability of his family's business and choose a suitable wife. As the Eiffel Tower rises, a marvel of steel and air and light, the subject of extreme controversy and a symbol of the future, Cait and Émile must decide what their love is worth.

Seamlessly weaving historical detail and vivid invention, Beatrice Colin evokes the revolutionary time in which Cait and Émile live--one of corsets and secret trysts, duels and Bohemian independence, strict tradition and Impressionist experimentation. To Capture What We Cannot Keep, stylish, provocative, and shimmering, raises probing questions about a woman's place in that world, the overarching reach of class distinctions, and the sacrifices love requires of us all.

Visit Beatrice Colin's website.

My Book, The Movie: To Capture What We Cannot Keep.

Writers Read: Beatrice Colin.

--Marshal Zeringue