THE NEW INTERNATIONALS

Faladé re-creates a post-WWII Paris filled with verve, trepidation, and heartbreak. As the City of Lights mends physically and emotionally from the war, it's overflowing with international students--Africans, Indo-Chinese, Arabs, and Americans. Narrator Jasmin Walker shines as she portrays Minette Traoré, a spirited French-born girl of Senegalese descent, and Cecile Rosenbaum, who is from a bourgeois Jewish family. The two meet on a bus while going to a communist youth conference. Walker lends empathy and hope when Cecile meets Sebastien Danxomè, an aspiring architecture student from West Africa, and romance blooms. Faladé's complicated and engaging novel celebrates the cultural movements of freewheeling post-WWII Paris with its young people who are enjoying romance, jazz clubs, and new, radical viewpoints. R.O. © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine [Published: MAY 2025]