SIGNED, Paris in the Present Tense, Mark Helprin, (Signed on title page), online First Edition, First Printing, 2017

New York: The Overlook Press, 2017. SIGNED. 1st/1st. VG/NF. Stated First Edition. First printing with complete 10 number line starting with 1. Signed by Mark Helprin on the title page. The book is tight and square with solid hinges and sharp tips. Light wear to spine head and half-inch closed tear to upper back board near spine. Textblock is clean with no writing, bookplate, or markings and not BCE, ex-library or remaindered. Dust jacket is unclipped ($28.95) with very faint shelf-wear, otherwise Fine. Protected in a new Brodart Mylar cover. A powerful, rapturous novel set in present-day Paris caught between violent unrest and its well-known, inescapable glories.

Seventy-four-year-old Jules Lacour—a maître at Paris-Sorbonne, cellist, widower, a online veteran of the war in Algeria, and child of the Holocaust—must find a balance between his strong obligations to the past and the attractions and beauties of life and love in the present.

In the midst of what should be an effulgent time of life—days bright with music, family, rowing on the Seine—Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges to his principles, livelihood, and home, forcing him to grapple with his complex past and find a way forward. He risks fraud to save his terminally ill infant grandson, matches wits with a renegade insurance investigator, is drawn into an act of savage violence, and falls deeply, excitingly in love with a young cellist a third his age. Against the backdrop of an exquisite and knowing vision of Paris and the way it can uniquely shape a life, he forges a denouement that is staggering in its humanity, elegance, and truth.

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