Publication July 28, 2026-Gallery Books-Women’s Fiction-368pp
Book Summary
Nine Americans in Paris. Seven intertwined love stories. One City of Light.
Love Actually meets The Notebook in a tale of love, loss, and finding your way home, all set over the course of one life-changing week in Paris.
Julia Glover has brought her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Piper, to Paris for the first time—but they know it will also be their last trip here together. Julia is dying, and as the mother and daughter desperately try to make memories together as the clock ticks down, the world opens up around them. Piper meets a cute French waiter, who might just understand her better than anyone she’s ever met, and Julia meets a man at a dive bar and struggles with how to tell him the truth about her future.
Rock star Jackson Quick’s glory days are behind him. He had a handful of hit songs thirty years ago, but he hasn’t toured in a decade. This week, he’ll launch his reunion tour in Paris, the city where it all began. But he wants more out of life than being defined by fame. When he meets a woman who finally sees him for who he is at his core, the ground shifts beneath his feet.
Henry McGee has been writing hit songs for decades—including Jackson Quick’s biggest hit, City of Light. But his secret is that every love song he’s ever written is for a woman named Celeste, whom he loved a lifetime ago, when they were both teenagers in Paris during World War II. He has spent eighty years believing she died—but when a letter arrives telling him the opposite, he’s on the first flight to France. Can he break through the haze of her dementia, using the songs he’s written all these years, to remind her of who they once were to each other—and to tell her he came back for her?
Henry’s granddaughter, Melody, has just discovered that her husband of twenty years, Gilles, a French cosmetics executive, is having an affair. When she confronts him, he tearfully apologizes and begs her to forgive him. But can she? And, perhaps even more importantly, does she want to? Or is there a different kind of life out there for her if she chooses to be alone?
These intertwining stories—plus several others—unfold over a few breathtaking spring days, as an unforgettable group of Americans in Paris must find their way to their own versions of happily ever after in the City of Light.
Grateful Reader Review by Dorothy Schwab
Meet Me in Paris, a vacation between the covers of a novel, is a collection of life stories intertwined and illuminated on the streets of Paris. The City of Light becomes a charming character all its own, as Kristin Harmel creates the magic of Paris for Piper, visiting for the first time with her dying mother, while recreating the world Henry knew when he was first there during World War II as a soldier protected by Celeste and the Resistance. The love stories of Shelby and her friends attempting a “divorce party,” three Viet Nam veterans returning for a reunion, and Jackson Quick, a “has been” rock star hoping for a successful comeback tour, are all packed into this travelogue. Readers will delight in the streets and bridges, bistros and bars, museums and memories as seven love stories of Americans from different walks of life rendezvous in the City of Light. The heartache of losing love and the joy of finding love; Meet Me in Paris is the pièce de résistance.
Kristin Harmel is the New York Times bestselling, USA Today bestselling, and #1 international bestselling author of The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau, The Paris Daughter, The Book of Lost Names, The Winemaker’s Wife, and a dozen other novels that have been translated into more than 35 languages and are sold all over the world. After graduating with a degree in journalism (with a minor in Spanish) from the University of Florida, she spent time living in Paris and Los Angeles and now lives in Orlando, with her husband and son. A breast cancer survivor, she is also the co-founder and co-host of the popular weekly web show and podcast Friends & Fiction.
The Grateful Reader 