Twilight: A Novel

Award-winning novelist Katherine Mosby examines the complex landscape of adultery while depicting a woman's unlikely blossoming in the face of war.

Lavinia Gibbs defies social convention and family expectations in New York in the 1930s when she breaks off a passionless engagement to a prominent banker. Instead of surrendering to an invisible spinsterhood, Lavinia moves to Paris, where, on the verge of World War II, her sexual and political awakening collide in an unforgettable tale.

In Paris, she establishes a household on the Rue Bonaparte with an ailing pug named Boswell. Cataloguing an estate at 34, Rue Vaneau, she meets Gaston Lesseur, a cultured, rumpled banker.

Their witty exchange of books and notes soon deepens into an illicit affair. Refusing the respectable detachment of her past, Lavinia surrenders to an intoxicating romance, even as the compromises of Gaston’s marriage exact their toll.

When the approach of war darkens the boulevards, their private sanctuary faces collapse. Surrounded by blackouts and curfews, Lavinia remains in an occupied capital where devotion demands its own perilous price.

• Forbidden Romance: Drawn to her married employer, Lavinia enters an affair conducted through hidden notes delivered by a loyal messenger and stolen hours at the Hôtel Trois Etoiles.
• Pre-WWII Paris: From smoky cafés near Montparnasse to rain-slicked bridges across the Seine, the City of Light glitters with defiant elegance in the final, fragile years before the German invasion.
• Coming of Age: Having spent her youth in the shadow of a beautiful sister and the strict dictates of Miss Dillwater’s Academy, thirty-six-year-old Lavinia finally claims her own agency and desire.
• Wartime Drama: As counterfeit identity papers, black market rations, and Gestapo raids engulf the capital, Lavinia must navigate a treacherous landscape where survival requires impossible choices.
• Also by This Author: The Season of Lillian Dawes.