Mademoiselle Chanel

C.W. Gortner's novel follows Gabrielle Chanel from the beginning: a father who abandoned his children after their mother's death, and a childhood spent with nuns. From that start she built "Coco", and then an empire.

Rejecting the corseted, frilled silhouette she had inherited, Chanel produced clean, minimal, wearable clothes that matched the ease and confidence of the modern woman of the 1920s, and her ambition carried her into elite Parisian society and its bohemian salons.

Gortner does not stop at the triumph. The novel follows her romantic losses, her difficult character, and the choices she was forced into — and made — when Paris fell to the Nazis, choices that would haunt her for the rest of her life.