Violette

SOE agent Violette Szabó was one of the most incredible women who operated behind enemy lines during the Second World War. The daughter of an English father and French mother, and widow of a French army officer, she was daring and courageous, conducting sabotage missions, being embroiled in gun battles and battling betrayal. On her second mission she was captured by the Nazis, interrogated and tortured, then deported to Germany where she was eventually executed at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Violette was one of the first women ever to be awarded the George Cross, and her fascinating life has been immortalised in film and on the page. Written by her daughter, Violette (formerly Young, Brave and Beautiful) reveals the woman and mother behind this extraordinary hero.

On an August evening in 1933, in a quiet, working-class neighborhood in Paris, eighteen-year-old Violette Nozière gave her mother and father glasses of barbiturate-laced "medication," which she told them had been prescribed by the family doctor; one of her parents died, the other barely survived. Almost immediately Violette’s act of "double parricide" became the most sensational private crime of the French interwar era—discussed and debated so passionately that it was compared to the Dreyfus Affair. Why would the beloved only child of respectable parents do such a thing? To understand the motives behind this crime and the reasons for its extraordinary impact, Sarah Maza delves into the abundant case records, re-creating the daily existence of Parisians whose lives were touched by the affair. This compulsively readable book brilliantly evokes the texture of life in 1930s Paris. It also makes an important argument about French society and culture while proposing new understandings of crime and social class in the years before World War II.

Book 1: Midnight in Montmartre, Luc and Mia's story Book 2: Violette Nights in Paris, Mathieu and Violette's story Book 3: Bon Appétit, Chérie, Philippe and Gianna's story Can France's most famous rock star fall in love with a shy realtor? Mathieu is the biggest rock star in France. His bandmates are happy to be rolling in the money and the girls, but at the end of their European tour, the only thing he feels is depressed. His band has lost touch with their original vision. Music has lost its purity, and he needs to shut himself away to write songs from the heart. What he wants is to buy a house in the countryside, away from the chaos of Paris. Violette is almost thirty, with no dating prospects on the horizon and a mother with Alzheimer’s to take care of. When a handsome client uses her service as a real estate agent, she has no idea that he’s the lead singer of Les Slinks. Mathieu’s afraid to reveal his identity, but when the truth is out, he has more than Violette to lose. A greedy record label exec wants to replace Mathieu with a new singer. Can he fix everything and win Violette back before it’s too late? Violette Nights in Paris, a sweet/clean romance, is a standalone novel in the French Kiss romance series. keywords: Clean romance, wholesome romance, paris romance, multicultural romance, romantic comedy, paris france romantic comedy novel, rockstar romance

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Set includes revised editions of some issues.

Japanese bound and beautifully printed in deep, dark, black ink on several kinds of paper, this volume documents New York artist Banks Violette's recent solo exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg, where he showed recent sculptures and site-specific installations made of metal, neon, varnish and glass. Calling upon Banks' goth sensibility, one of the kinetic sculptural works actually destroyed itself over the course of the exhibition; another was fabricated of deep-frozen elements. According to the esteemed independent curator and former Director of Exhibitions at London's Royal Academy of Arts Norman Rosenthal, "Violette's gothic installations are operatic analyses of the dark side of American culture. Violette's heavy-metal stylings become a mirror of the anxiety in youth culture, an adopted language compensating and empowering those who suffer sensations of immense sorrow and despair... Fuelled by its associations with violence, satanism, racism and nationalism, Violette uses the Goth genre as both symptom and cause of individual amorality and social breakdown."

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This sweeping novel from the author of A Long Petal of the Sea tells the epic story of Violeta Del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century. “An immersive saga about a passion-filled life.”—People ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PopSugar, Real Simple, Reader’s Digest Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family with five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth. Through her father’s prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known. Her family loses everything and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. There, she will come of age, and her first suitor will come calling. She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting times of devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Her life is shaped by some of the most important events of history: the fight for women’s rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and ultimately not one, but two pandemics. Through the eyes of a woman whose unforgettable passion, determination, and sense of humor carry her through a lifetime of upheaval, Isabel Allende once more brings us an epic that is both fiercely inspiring and deeply emotional.