From internationally bestselling author Bryn Turnbull comes a breathtaking novel about art theft and forgery in Nazi-occupied Paris, and two brave women who risk their lives rescuing looted masterpieces from Nazi destruction.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Bryn Turnbull’s The Paris Deception, which is out now!
Sophie Dix fled Stuttgart with her brother as the Nazi regime gained power in Germany. Now, with her brother gone and her adopted home city of Paris conquered by the Reich, Sophie reluctantly accepts a position restoring damaged art at the Jeu de Paume museum under the supervision of the ERR—a German art commission using the museum as a repository for art they’ve looted from Jewish families.
Fabienne Brandt was a rising star in the Parisian bohemian arts movement until the Nazis put a stop to so-called “degenerate” modern art. Still mourning the loss of her firebrand husband, she’s resolved to muddle her way through the occupation in whatever way she can—until her estranged sister-in-law, Sophie, arrives at her door with a stolen painting in hand.
Soon the two women embark upon a plan to save Paris’s “degenerates,” working beneath the noses of Germany’s top art connoisseurs to replace the paintings in the Jeu de Paume with skillful forgeries—but how long can Sophie and Fabienne sustain their masterful illusion?
June 1940
Sophie Brandt bent over her desk, working a small awl beneath the rusty nail wedged into the frame of a painting. She lifted the nail, carefully pulling back the canvas from the shattered edge of the stretcher. The painting—one of Gauguin’s earlier pieces—had been left mercifully undamaged in the fall that had broken the stretcher, remnants of which she’d swept up off the marble floor of the gallery, inspecting the debris for any flakes of pigment that might have been rattled loose by the careless rumble of German tanks down the Rue de Rivoli.
She lifted the canvas and set it aside, clearing away the broken stretcher before pulling out a new one she’d made based on the old frame’s measurements. To Sophie, this was the most intimate part of the restoration process: the canvas, devoid of the musculature provided by the frame or supports, holding only a suggestion of its former shape. She worked quickly, tacking the linen to the stretcher midway down the painting before pulling it tight over its new bones. The painting seemed to breathe as she worked, responding to her touch with a relieved groan as she hammered the stretcher keys in place.
She turned the painting over, satisfied at its taut appearance. Paul would be proud. Sophie had been a restorer at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris for nearly two years now, and while she’d made friends in the French art community, there was no one, perhaps, she was as close to as Paul Rosenberg. Until recently, he had been one of Paris’s most preeminent art dealers, specializing in the modern art which Sophie loved best. He’d become Sophie’s first true friend in Paris—and, she suspected, had put in a friendly word with Monsieur Girard at the Jeu de Paume that had resulted in her job offer.
Paul had escaped France at the first rumblings of war, his beautiful gallery shuttered before the mass exodus of Parisians made it difficult to leave the city. But for the paintings he’d deposited at the Jeu de Paume for safekeeping, it was as if Paul Rosenberg had never lived in Paris.
Sophie recalled her last visit to his quiet gallery. They had lingered in front of Picasso’s portrait of Paul’s wife and daughter. It was a good likeness, thought Sophie, one that captured the quiet, steady presence of Madame Rosenberg, and the wonderfully disgruntled expression on the baby’s cherubic face.
“They’ll be here soon,” Paul had said, his thin moustache set over stern lips. He turned away from the painting. “Your countrymen. Come to claim their due.”
“Not my countrymen,” she’d replied. “They’ve not been my countrymen for a long time.”
Paul lit a cigarette. “Brave words,” he’d told her, snapping the brass lid of his lighter shut. “But once the Germans arrive, will you be so quick to disassociate yourself?”
Holed away in her laboratory, Sophie listened for the sound of jackboots outside the open casement windows, the faint snarl of German echoing through tinny loudspeakers from the Arc de Triomphe.
She walked over to the window and pulled it closed, fastening the latch before returning her attention to the painting. She thought once more on Paul’s question.
Now that the Germans were here, she didn’t know the answer.
One week earlier
The sky over Paris was dark, the sun a pale coin in the sky that flickered in and out of focus behind billows of soot-blackened clouds. In her attic apartment, Fabienne wrenched open the window, wedging the stump of a paintbrush in the frame to keep it open as she eased herself onto the sill.
Though the fires were burning in the city’s petroleum reserves on the outskirts of town, the smoke had made its way into the Left Bank’s narrow streets, choking the crowded cobblestones with its acrid stench. Fabienne could see the logic behind the city’s decision to burn what they could rather than leave behind spoils of war for the enemy, but the move had sparked panic among the fleeing population. In the streets below, she watched a man and woman argue beside an idling Peugeot, its roof rack laden with suitcases. A child, wailing, as his father swept him into an overflowing handcart.
“You’re too late, you know!” Fabienne called down. Tucked six floors up in the eaves of her building’s mansard roof, Fabienne knew the couple couldn’t hear her, but it felt good to shout all the same. “They’ll be here by this evening!” She reached back into the kitchen to pull out a half-drunk bottle of red wine. “What’s the point, when they’ve already won?”
And the Germans had won—that much was clear. They’d won without having to fire a gun within the city limits; they’d won without having dropped a single incendiary bomb. The thought that Paris had given up without a fight rankled Fabienne. Surely someone, somewhere, shared her sense of injustice? Paris was the city of la Révolution: the city of barricades in the streets, its citizens fighting and fucking and acting out their passions with the conviction of players in a penny dreadful. Surely Paris could muster some semblance of resistance before rolling onto its back for the German army?
She tapped her cigarette against the windowsill and the ember floated down, past the modest fourth-and fifth-floor apartments, where she could hear Madame de Frontenac pleading with her balding husband through the open window; past the elegant second-story apartment with its gracious wrought iron balcony. Had the apartment’s residents, the Lowensteins, left Paris? Fabienne pictured Madame Lowenstein, with her cream-colored Chanel suits and iron curls; Monsieur Lowenstein, his beloved black-and-white toy poodle tucked beneath his arm. She hoped they’d been able to get out—she hoped most of the city’s Jewish residents had been able to flee, before the long line of refugees choked the railroads and motorways to a standstill.
In a few short days, everything Fabienne knew would change: it was inevitable, once Paris became a conquered city. What would remain of the France she’d known her whole life? What would remain of herself? Her talent, her courage, her convictions—all the parts of herself that Dietrich had once loved. What would remain, at the end of the war?
She watched the long line of vehicles snake its way along the Boulevard Saint-Germain and turned back into the gloom of her empty apartment, wishing she could feel some appreciation for the gravity of the moment: fear, panic, worry. Anger at the thought of her beloved city left unguarded; despair at the notion that she’d been left behind to survive in a city circling the drain of war.
She glanced back at the half-finished painting on her easel, the canvas she’d not been able to finish in over two years; swirls of color, black on blue. Desiccated paintbrushes lay on the crossbar, the dried oil on the bristles matching the exact shade of her husband’s eyes.
There was nothing to be frightened of because the worst had already happened. There was nothing more the Germans could take from her.
Excerpted from THE PARIS DECEPTION. Copyright © 2023 by Bryn Turnbull. Published by MIRA, an imprint of HTP/HarperCollins.
