{"product_id":"beautiful-nights-isbn-9780593157879","title":"Beautiful Nights:A Novel","description":"\u003cb\u003eA respected professor begins a secret affair with her son’s girlfriend one summer on the Brittany coast in this intense, poetic novel from the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eThe Little Paris Bookshop\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eClaire is one of Paris’s most esteemed behavioral biologists, with an enviable career and family. But she has become increasingly frustrated by the stasis of her marriage, including her husband’s unremarked-on affairs, and feels caged by the obligations she took on too early in life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs she and her family prepare for their annual holiday to the Brittany coast, her son, Nico, comes to her with a request: Can his new girlfriend, Julie, join them for the summer? Nico feels certain that this is the next step in merging their lives together, but Julie wonders if this man is really her path or if her passions—for performance, for intimacy, for a bigger life—will jeopardize their future.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat Julie and Claire don’t realize is that they share a secret—they’ve met before, in a compromising moment whose implications color their relationship from the moment it’s revealed. Both Julie and Claire are at a crossroads, each waiting for something that will set her on fire inside—the rush of life, colors, courage. Under the blazing Brittany sun, by the tranquility of the sea and in the raging of a nighttime thunderstorm, they will ignite and never be the same again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSensual, provocative, and probing, Nina George’s \u003ci\u003eBeautiful Nights\u003c\/i\u003e explores femininity in all its facets and stages. It is a story of becoming who you were meant to be by breaking apart the things you’ve always known. | \u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eBeautiful\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003cb\u003eNights\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Emotion-evoking . . . George does an excellent job with the setting of this story to amplify the feeling of longing between the women . . . There is a lot of good in this novel; the story of Claire and Julie is a moving one, and one that I think is important to be told as we take steps to change expectations of women and make them simply for a woman to be herself.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eChicago Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“George’s fluid and lyrical prose carries the reader along as the story alternates from languid scenes to heavy emotions. It’s a worthy choice for the beach bag.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Publishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eThe Little Village of Book Lovers\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[Nina] George brings to fruition the previously fictitious novel that inspired Monsieur Perdu’s floating bookshop in her bestselling \u003ci\u003eThe Little Paris Bookshop.\u003c\/i\u003e . . . George’s moving, magical relationship novel is full of pain and promise.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal, \u003c\/i\u003estarred review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An elegantly crafted, unhurried examination of the enthralling and elusive nature of love.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Kirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling novel \u003ci\u003eThe Little Paris Bookshop\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] bona fide international hit.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If you’re looking to be charmed right out of your own life for a few hours, sit down with this wise and winsome novel.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eOprah Daily\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A beautiful story of grief, companionship, forgiveness and building a life worth living . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Little Paris Bookshop \u003c\/i\u003eis . . . medicine for the wounded soul.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBookPage\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e | \u003cb\u003eNina George\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Little Paris Bookshop\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Little French Bistro\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Book of Dreams, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Little Village of Book Lovers\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003ci\u003eThe Little Paris Bookshop\u003c\/i\u003e spent more than forty weeks on the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestseller list and was translated into thirty-six languages. George is the former president of the European Writers' Council. She is married to the writer Jens J. Kramer. Together they also write mystery novels and children's books. Nina George lives in Berlin and in a little fishing village in Brittany. | \u003cb\u003e1\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt happened to people, this longing, emerging from an unknown void, grabbing the soul with a firm hand, the urge to simply let go and sink to the depths of the ocean. Deeper and deeper, without resistance, throwing away yourself and your life, as if you had come from the gorges of the sea and were destined to return there one day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eVertigo marée,\u003c\/i\u003e the old Breton fishermen called it, that desire that came from nowhere—­to erase the self, to be free, free from everything. It usually came on the most beautiful of nights, that was why fishermen avoided looking into the deep, and hung thick curtains at their sea-­facing windows when on dry land.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe thought of this occupied Claire as she dressed, and the stranger asked: “Will I see you again?” He lay naked on the bed; the brass ceiling fan turned sluggishly, tracing a revolving star of shadowy stripes on his bare skin. The man stretched out an arm as Claire zipped up her pencil skirt at the back. He reached for her hand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe knew he was asking whether they would do it again. Share a secret hour behind closed doors. Whether this would start to mean something, or end here and now, in Room 32 of the Hotel Langlois, Paris.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eClaire looked into his eyes. Dark-­blue eyes. It would have been easy to sink into their depths.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eIn every gaze, we seek the ocean. And in every ocean, that one gaze.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis eyes were the ocean at Sanary-­sur-­Mer on a hot summer’s day, when the mistral shakes the overripe figs from the trees and the dazzling white pavements are speckled with their purple juice and windswept blossoms. Eyes he had kept open the whole time, looking at Claire, holding her gaze as he moved inside her. The unfamiliar ocean of his eyes was one reason she had sought him out on the terrace of Galeries Lafayette. That, and the fact that he wore a wedding ring on his finger.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJust like her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“No,” Claire said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe had known that it would only happen once. No surnames. No exchange of telephone numbers. None of the intimacies of an all too banal conversation about their children, or shopping at the Marché d’Aligre, steak frites at Poulette, movies, travel plans, and why they were doing this to each other. Why they had left their lives for an hour to press themselves against a stranger’s skin, trace unfamiliar body contours, enclose unfamiliar lips, before slipping back into the regular outline of their lives.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eClaire knew her own reasons.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis were none of her business.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTheir hands separated simultaneously. Slipped apart. The last touch and perhaps the tenderest. He didn’t ask why, he expressed no regret. He let Claire go just as she did him, a piece of flotsam on the tide of the day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eClaire picked up her open handbag, which had fallen from the cherrywood coffee table by the garret window earlier, when the man had pressed her gently against one of the pillars and lifted the hem of her dress, feeling the silk edge of her stockings and smiling as he kissed her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eClaire had planned to seek out someone like him among the thousands of faces in Paris. The sudden vision of one’s own body pressing against the other. The same vision, mirrored in the other’s gaze.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter her last lecture before the two-­month summer break, she had put the stockings on in her office at the university for that sole reason. And quietly slipped away from the obligatory end-of-­term staff party after half a glass of ice-­cold champagne. The other professors were used to Claire withdrawing discreetly from festivities. “Madame le Professeur always leaves before the moment normal people switch to first names,” Claire had once heard a lecturer say to a new research assistant in the ladies’ room. Neither of them knew that Claire was in one of the cubicles. She had waited until the women were gone. Up till then, she hadn’t noticed that she wasn’t on first-­name terms with any of her colleagues.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome were afraid of her knowledge: as a behavioral biologist, she knew the anatomy of human emotions and actions. They feared her insights into volition and choice in the same way that many people fear psychologists, hoping the experts will see right through them to the very backbone of their being and understand what has made them what they are, with all their transgressions, compulsions, and guiltless wounds, yet dreading what such a tomograph of the soul might uncover beneath the layers of good manners and secrets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe wouldn’t put the stockings on again, but dump them straight in the black and gold waste bin in the small ensuite with its art deco tiles on her way out.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eClaire gathered together her keys, mobile, leather notebook, and university ID card, without which no one could get past the armed guards outside the Sorbonne and its associated institutes, and put them all back into the silk interior of her bag. She fastened it and twisted her dark-blond hair into a neat chignon at the nape of her neck.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You’re beautiful in the light from the window,” the man said. “Stay like that for a minute. That’s how I’ll carry you around with me. Until we forget about each other.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe obliged. He wanted to make it easy for them. He had tasted of milk and sugar, of coffee and desire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe attic room, with the dark wood Provence dresser, the round white table, the dove-­gray Versailles chairs, the bed with the summer linen, was now quite still, and the melody of Paris city life was stirring outside. The hum of air conditioners, fans, engines. As if she was emerging from a faraway sea after floating in a liquefied existence broken only by her own breath, and materializing into the old Claire, in the overheated intensity of a Parisian day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe looked out over the roofs of Montmartre. At the rows of clay chimneys along their narrow ridges. It was after five in the afternoon, the June sun burning a cavity in time, making the roofs shimmer in the silvery gray that resembled the moment of awakening. When the dream ends and reality fades in, still blurred. The moment Spinoza once described as the “place of the one true freedom.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eRoofs like one of Erik Satie’s\u003c\/i\u003e Gymnopédies\u003ci\u003e.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat’s what Gilles would say. His observations on the world were always musical. He preferred hearing to seeing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOpposite the hotel was a balcony terrace. A man was laying the table with blue plates; a small boy clung to one of his legs, chuckling with delight as he rode on his papa’s foot.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike Nicolas, Claire thought.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHer son, her child, back in the days when he was so small that her arms reached all the way around him, that little parcel of trust and curiosity, smelling of pancakes and untapped hope. Nowadays her arms barely reached to Nico’s broad shoulders.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat was she doing here?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStanding by the window of a run-­down, midrange hotel, her back to a strange man who still had her taste on his lips, thinking about her son, full of helpless, tender love, thinking of her husband, who used to sing when she entered the room until one day he stopped, thinking of his familiar face that she knew so well, in every variant. The lover’s face, the liar’s face.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOpposite, a woman in cutoff jeans and a strappy vest came out of the kitchen onto the terrace. She wrapped her arms around the child’s father from behind. He smiled and bent to kiss her hand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eClaire turned away from the window, stepped into her open-­toe leather pumps, hung her bag over her shoulder, inhaled, and straightened up, looking the man on the bed in the eye.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s a privilege,” he said slowly, “to know you’re losing someone. That way you can remember the moment. Often, we lose someone without warning.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA wordless minute passed, then she left Room 32.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe pressed the button for the old lift and deep below her it shuddered into life in its wrought-iron shaft. Too slowly. She didn’t want to wait, just a few meters from the bed, from the man, from that moment of freedom.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eVertigo marée:\u003c\/i\u003e it existed on land too; if she had looked into the depths of his eyes for too long, she would have let herself fall. First, they would have talked about their favorite markets and travel plans, and soon they would have begun to ask each other the dangerous questions: what do you dream about, what are you afraid of, haven’t you always wanted to . . . ? They would have gotten to know each other. And they would have begun to hide from each other.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eClaire walked briskly down the narrowly winding staircase of the Langlois with its worn red carpet, distancing herself from the room.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn the second floor, she heard the voice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eNe me quitte pas,\u003c\/i\u003e” it whispered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was coming from Number 22.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eNe me quitte pas\u003c\/i\u003e. Don’t leave me. | New York Times bestselling author of The Little Paris Bookshop","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48759437295845,"sku":"NP9780593157879","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593157879.jpg?v=1775598545","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/beautiful-nights-isbn-9780593157879","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}