LOST IN PARIS

When a yellowed deed to an apartment in Paris turns up in an old attic trunk, an estranged mother and daughter must unite to reveal the secret life of a family matriarch in this debut novel tracing one family's lineage from the Roaring Twenties to 2020.

Hannah Bond has always been a bookworm, which is why she fled Florida - and her unstable, recovering alcoholic of a mother - for a quiet life leading Jane Austen-themed tours through the British countryside. But on New Year's Eve, everything seems to come crashing down around her when she arrives back at her London flat to find her mother, Marla, waiting for her.

Marla's brought two things with her: a black eye from her ex-boyfriend and an envelope she discovered while cleaning out the attic of Hannah's childhood home. Its contents? The deed to an apartment in Paris, what appears to be a key to it, and newspaper clippings about the death of a famous writer named Andres Armand. Hannah, wary of her mother's motives, reluctantly agrees to accompany her to Paris, where against all odds, they discover great-grandma Ivy's one-bedroom apartment frozen in 1940 and covered in layers of dust and gossamer cobwebs.

As Hannah and Marla uncover clues about great-grandma Ivy in the nooks and crannies of the apartment - including a diary detailing evenings spent drinking and dancing with Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds and a weathered manuscript with no author - they trace her steps through the city in an attempt to understand why she never mentioned her life in Paris before settling in Florida during the war. They travel from Shakespeare & Co. to Gertrude Stein's salon to Ivy's favorite day drinking spots along the Seine, getting lost along the way and fighting plenty, but ultimately finding their way back to each other.

Elizabeth Thompson formerly lived in France, has a degree in journalism, and, as Nancy Robards Thompson, is a long-time and beloved romance writer for Harlequin Books. Critics have deemed her writing "funny, smart and observant."