Last Twilight in Paris

London, 1953. Adjusting uneasily to her quiet life as a postwar housewife, Louise comes across a half necklace in a box at a secondhand shop, marked with the name of a Paris department store. She is certain she has seen it before, during her years with the Red Cross in Nazi-occupied Europe, and that it is tied to the unexplained death of her friend Franny. The search to understand it leads her back to people and places she had tried to leave behind. A second thread opens in 1938, following Helaine, a sheltered young Jewish woman in Paris who falls in love with a cellist and is later separated from him and imprisoned at Levitan, a real department store the Germans used to hold prisoners and sort goods plundered from Jewish homes. The two timelines move toward each other across a decade, gradually revealing how their lives intersected. Drawing on a little-known corner of wartime history, the novel weaves together love, loss, and the long work of uncovering the truth, asking what people owe to the dead and how far they will go to keep a promise.