Book Club: 5 French February Reads for Valentine's Day & Black History Month

It’s the first week of Février, which means it’s also the perfect time to snuggle up and catch up on some reading. Since this is the time of year best known for l’amour and Black history, why not revisit some favorites from last year’s French book club to fit both themes?

Book Club: 5 French February Reads for Valentine's Day & Black History Month

Famed Black expatriate James Baldwin brings us a moving, LGBTQ semi-autobiographical romance, set among the backdrop of the 1950s Paris nightclub scene, while notable Black actor and musician Gordon Heath shares a memoir of the illustrious career that brought him to Paris where he eventually finished out his life.

Women’s rights advocate Monique Y. Wells takes us on a tour of the rich Black history woven into the fabric of Parisian arts and culture, through a series of historical walking tours with co-author Christian Anderson.

Screen legend Olivia de Havilland’s juicy memoir recounts meeting her French husband at the Cannes Film Festival, seeing her days as an American suddenly Gone With the Wind as she relocates to Paris with her young son, while Kati Morton shares a touching tale of love and loss throughout chapters of her own life in France.

Giovanni’s Room

By James Baldwin
(Fiction)

“James Baldwin’s groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris.

In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.”

Deep Are the Roots: Memoirs of a Black Expatriate

By Gordon Heath
(Memoir)

“In these pages we meet a man, meet him as a child, an actor in training, an actor in performance. We meet a black man born in the United States in 1918 who fashioned a life for himself that kept him mostly abroad, mostly in Paris. Gordon Heath can be counted among such distinguished black expatriates as Ira Aldridge, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. Their names have been written larger than his in the record books, but with the publication of his memoirs Gordon Heath moves from footnote status to deserved inclusion in the text itself.”

Every Frenchman Has One

By Olivia de Havilland
(Memoir)

”In 1953, Olivia de Havilland—already an Academy Award-winning actress for her roles in To Each His Own and The Heiress—became the heroine of her own real-life love affair. She married a Frenchman, moved to Paris, and planted her standard on the Left Bank of the River Seine. It has been fluttering on both Left and Right Banks with considerable joy and gaiety from that moment on.

Still, her transition from Hollywood celebrity to parisienne was anything but easy. And in Every Frenchman Has One, her skirmishes with French customs, French maids, French salesladies, French holidays, French law, French doctors, and above all, the French language, are here set forth in a delightful and amusing memoir of her early years in the “City of Light.”

Paris Reflections: Walks Through African-American Paris

By Christian Anderson & Monique Y. Wells
(Non Fiction)

“This guidebook takes the reader on six walking tours through the historic districts of Paris where, for more than two centuries, African Americans have lived, worked, and created a rich and vibrant legacy of achievement in art, literature, science, business, sport, social reform, and other fields. From the 18th to the 20th century, the Parisian legacy of African Americans has been shaped by such women and men as Sally Hemings, Ada Bricktop Smith, Jack Johnson, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Sidney Bechet, and James Baldwin.”

Paris: A Love Story

By Kati Marton
(Memoir)

“In this remarkably honest and candid memoir, award-winning journalist and distinguished author Kati Marton narrates an impassioned and romantic story of love, loss, and life after loss.

At every stage of her life, Paris offers Marton beauty and excitement, and now, after the sudden death of her husband Richard Holbrooke, it offers a chance for a fresh beginning. With intimate and nuanced portraits of Peter Jennings, the man to whom she was married for fifteen years and with whom she had two children, and Richard, with whom she found enduring love, Marton paints a vivid account of an adventuresome life in the stream of history. Inspirational and deeply human, Paris: A Love Story will touch every generation.”