Review - Love from Paris by Alexandra Potter

Love from Paris by Alexandra Potter
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton (24th Sept 2015)

Blurb:
When new boyfriend Jack stands her up at the airport, Ruby Miller dries her tears, jumps on the Eurostar and heads to Paris. She thinks she's going there to visit an old friend and have a total break from romance. But the City of Love has other ideas.

A locked apartment where time has stood still, a bundle of long-lost love letters and a flirtatious French lawyer sweep Ruby into a mystery that spans over seventy years. Who is the author of the letters? Why did the owner of the apartment close up the shutters and flee Paris before the war, never to return? And what secret was she hiding?

As the mystery deepens, Ruby turns love detective but it's not long before the ghosts of the past throw her own love affair into jeopardy.

An Alexandra Potter book is definitely a highlight of my year and an absolute treat to feed my hopelessly romantic soul. I read quite a number of them and I keep discovering how much of an amazing writer she is and how her stories are magical and wonderful.

Last year, I read The Love Detective which is the first book in her first ever series, following the story of a novelist who travels to India to look for her sister. There, she meets Jack, the guy who started off as a bit of a git and gradually, they fall in love with each other. Now, in Love from Paris, Ruby Miller finds herself alone at the arrivals at Heathrow when Jack suddenly has a work crisis and is unable to fly to London to celebrate her birthday with her. Gutted, she travels to Paris to see her friend and a romantic mystery awaits the Love Detective!

In Love from Paris, we find Alexandra Potter’s heroine, Ruby, in Paris after a disastrous misfortune in the airport. As a self-proclaimed Francophile, I love Paris and everything the City of Love boasts, from the glorious grandeur of the city’s enriched architecture to the art by the world’s most renowned artists to the delicious and sumptuous delights a patisserie has to offer, I am completely smitten with the French culture. While reading the sequel of The Love Detective, it was everything I hoped for in a novel that is set in Paris.

The heroine, Ruby is definitely a likeable character. I felt connected to her as she and I are both hopeless romantics, always looking at things and facing situations from a romantic’s perspective. As Alexandra Potter has mentioned, Love from Paris is her most romantic book to date and I couldn’t agree more. Although it doesn’t focus much on Ruby’s love story as it did in The Love Detective, it was refreshing to read about a love story that panned throughout decades and a beautiful, heartwarming love affair that’s hidden behind the mystery of an old apartment.

Love from Paris is truly a magnificent love story that will capture hearts of its readers as well as bind them to a story that is effortlessly timeless and beautiful. With letters to create the perfect re-imagination of Paris back in the 1940s, you could read the love and passion imbued in every word. I would definitely recommend this enchanting novel to anyone who is in need of a slice of heaven. Or a holiday for the price of a book – pure escapism!

I'd like to thank Hodder & Stoughton for sending me a copy for review. Love from Paris is out now on paperback and eBook.