The Paris Architect
Paris, 1942. Lucien Bernard is a gifted but underemployed French architect who, like many of his professional class, has decided that the German occupation is not his problem. Then a wealthy industrialist named Manet offers him a commission with a strange condition: along with the new factory Lucien is to design for the Reich, he must design a single hiding place inside another building, completely undetectable, large enough to hold one Jew. Lucien needs the work and rationalizes the favor as one job, one room, then one more, then a network of impossible compartments behind walls and stairwells across the city. As his real client list grows, his Gestapo contacts deepen, and the cost of every hidden compartment becomes harder to walk away from. Charles Belfoure's 2013 debut novel uses the discipline of architecture to tell a wartime story about complicity, courage, and the small material ingenuities by which a few hundred lives were saved.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about The Paris Architect
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Lucien Bernard is a struggling Catholic architect in 1942 occupied Paris when an industrialist offers him a strange commission. For the price of a real factory job designing weapons plants for the Reich, Lucien is asked to invent hiding places inside Parisian apartments for wealthy Jewish clients.
The Paris Architect was written by Charles Belfoure and published in 2013. Belfoure is a practicing architect; the novel draws on his expertise. The Paris Architect was a New York Times bestseller.
The Paris Architect is fictional but built around the real Nazi-occupied Paris and the documented practice of hiding Jews in concealed spaces. Charles Belfoure researched the period extensively.
The Paris Architect is 371 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Paris Architect takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
The Paris Architect is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Paris Architect is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.