My new novel Civilisation Française will be coming out July 16th!
Publisher: Heliotrope Books
When recent college graduate Lily Owens enrolls in the Civilisation Française course at the Sorbonne in 1982, she hopes to put a troubled childhood behind her and find direction for adulthood. She moves into a mansion on the place des Vosges where her job is helping elderly, half-blind Amenia Quinon, another ex-pat American. Amenia is haunted by memories of World War II, as is her Jewish housekeeper, Germaine. The three women live alone in this house of silence and secrets, until Lily surreptitiously lets a love interest move into the empty wing. When Thibaud is joined by others, the abandoned part of the house quickly turns into a squat, upending the lives of the three women, but ultimately bringing them closer together.
“Mary Fleming brings a fresh, tragicomic view to the Américaine-in- Paris Novel, exploring the intertwined lives of two expatriates: a rich widow haunted by World War II, and a young woman struggling to overcome a traumatic childhood. Civilisation Française is eloquent, erudite and entertaining.”
The Art of Regret
October 2019
In The Art of Regret, a novel by Mary Fleming, late-thirty-something American Trevor McFarquhar is doing his best to lead an aimless and apathetic existence in Paris. Full of resentment and unresolved feelings toward his bourgeois family, and still mourning the long-ago deaths of his young sister and, a year later, his father, Trevor abandoned an early career as a photographer and now half-heartedly runs a bicycle shop, while pursuing various women he terms Casuals. But the 1995 French transport strike and a liaison dangereuse with his sister-in-law upend Trevor’s plan for non-living. Five years later, humbled by his immoral act, tired of his desultory life and actually missing his family, Trevor is given a second chance to find redemption and even love.
Someone Else
2014
Elizabeth Teller, a forty-something Anglo-American living in Paris, has it all: a well-connected French architect husband, four children and a job at a revered French publishing house. But with the sudden appearance of a former lover, a less glorious past comes back to haunt her. The dream life begins to crumble. A darker side of pretty Paris emerges. More info
Praise for Someone Else
“Brew a cup of tea, put on your most comfortable outfit, silence the phone, and read Mary Fleming’s Someone Else.
Elizabeth Teller has carefully constructed a life in a beautiful Paris quartier with her architect husband Lucas, and her four children. She plays the role of perfect wife and mother, and enjoys her work as a busy editor at a large publishing house. She’s learned how to obey the French conventions that guarantee her a place in a prominent family. But when Elizabeth bumps into an old friend on his first trip to Paris, a moral dilemma she’s refused to confront is suddenly unavoidable. Her lovely life begins to crumble and then to break.
Someone Else keeps the reader enthralled and entertained, hoping for the best while fascinated by the consequences of a terrible mistake.”
“Written in a distinctive and luminous style, “Someone Else” is both a meditation on and an evocative portrait of how past events affect and destroy a seemingly perfect marriage and how the consequences will forever alter the lives of the characters — for ultimately, perhaps, more mindful and authentic ones.”
“Everyone carries guilty secrets. Some are slowly forgotten, others lie dormant, as if awaiting their moment to cause havoc. In Mary Fleming’s gripping new novel, Someone Else, Elizabeth Teller ran away from her secret - her betrayal of an American college room-mate in a prank that went horribly wrong – but it catches up with her years later. A long-time resident of Paris, Elizabeth sees an unexpected encounter with her former room-mate as anything but accidental, convinced he has come to exact revenge. Perhaps he has, but Elizabeth misreads the signs. In the comfortable setting of bourgeois Paris, Mary Fleming skilfully guides us through the dark passages where guilt feeds greedily on tortured consciences. After readingSomeone Else, no one will feel their secrets are safe.”