The War Begins in Paris, Theodore Wheeler
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The War Begins in Paris
A Novel

Author: Theodore Wheeler

Narrator: Elisabeth Rodgers

Unabridged: 10 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/14/2023


Synopsis

From the author of Kings of Broken Things and In Our Other Lives comes a provocative and stylish literary noir about two female war correspondents whose fates intertwine in Europe. Paris, 1938. Two women meet: Mielle, a shy pacifist and shunned Mennonite who struggles to fit in with the elite cohort of foreign correspondents stationed around the city; the other, Jane, a brash, legendary American journalist, who is soon to become a fascist propagandist. When World War II makes landfall in the City of Lights, Mielle falls under Jane’s spell, growing ever more intoxicated by her glamour, self-possession, and reckless confidence. But as this recklessness devolves into militarism and an utter lack of humanity, Mielle is seized by a series of visions that show her an inescapable truth: Jane Anderson must die, and Mielle must be the one to kill her.

Structured as a series of dispatches filed from around Europe and based on the misadventures of a real journalist-turned-Nazi mouthpiece, The War Begins in Paris is a cat-and-mouse suspense that examines the relentlessness of propaganda, the allure of power, and how far one woman will go for the sake of her morality. “Propulsive, immersive, and beautifully rendered, Theodore Wheeler…deftly illuminates themes of friendship, love, sacrifice, and heroism, and shows us how loyalty and conviction can move in unpredictable patterns under wartime duress. This is a major gut-punch of a novel, and I, for one, am thankful it exists.” —James Han Mattson, author of Reprieve

Author Bio

Theodore Wheeler is a reporter who covers civil law and politics in Omaha, where he lives with his wife and their two daughters. His fiction has been featured in Best New American Voices, New Stories from the Midwest, the Southern Review, the Kenyon Review, and Boulevard and received special mention in a Pushcart Prize anthology. A graduate of the MFA program at Creighton University, Wheeler was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany; a resident of the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City; and a winner of the Marianne Russo Award from the Key West Literary Seminar. He is the author of Bad Faith, a collection of short fiction. Kings of Broken Things is his first novel.

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