THE POSTMISTRESS OF PARIS

Love and peril in Vichy, France.

Mary Jayne Gold, an American heiress who worked to rescue artists and intellectuals from Nazi-occupied France, has inspired Clayton’s spirited reimagining of those turbulent years, centered on the intrepid Nanée Gold—she can fly a plane!—and the handsome photojournalist Edouard Moss, a widower with an impossibly adorable young daughter. While Nanée and Edouard are fictional, Clayton embeds them in a world of real people: Marc Chagall, incredulous that his own government would turn against him; Pablo Picasso, who refused to leave Paris; Leonora Carrington, who comes to a gathering at Nanée’s Paris apartment; Lion Feuchtwanger, Hans Bellmer, and Max Ernst, among many others imprisoned at the Camp des Milles internment camp; and André Breton and his wife, Jacqueline, who hold a salon in the Villa Air-Bel, a safe house secured and paid for by Nanée, where fellow surrealists distract themselves in talk, dancing, and games. Although friends urge Nanée to go home, she has no interest in returning to a vacuous life as a socialite; instead, she insists, she “wanted to do something to help, the same as any decent person in this newly terrible world surely must.” Her chance comes in 1940, with the arrival of Varian Fry, sent by the American Emergency Rescue Committee to facilitate the escape of some 200 painters, composers, and writers in danger of Nazi persecution. Fry, realizing the benefit of Naneé’s willingness and wealth, makes her a courier—a postmistress—delivering messages throughout Paris. The plot thickens when Nanée becomes infatuated with Moss, who has been sent to Camp des Milles. Dressed in a couture suit, wearing diamonds and a dab of Chanel No. 5, Naneé devises her own mission to get him out. As their love affair intensifies, so do their desperate efforts to find Moss’ daughter and, somehow, survive the ominous world of war.

Sympathetic characters propel a tense narrative.