About the Novel

The Good Mother of Marseille

The summer of 2013 in Marseille, in the year of its designation as the European Capital of Culture. Americans wander and sightsee this dangerous, impoverished yet seductive city. Noémie, a central character and an anthropology student, wants to stay.

She wants to make the gritty graffiti-covered neighborhood of Cours Julien her home, but she’s running out of time, money, and her university sponsor’s patience.

Noémie watches over Corey, from New Jersey, who is an earlier version of her: also an anthropology student, he’s just getting started. But what he wants is very different. He searches the Marseille streets for someone to love. In the old port, the wife of a small-town Alabama couple presses to see all the sights while her husband is losing his vision to an eye disease. Noémie intersects with everyone—has she stolen the couple’s passports? A Colorado man with late-stage cancer and fear of the unexpected falls in love with a French woman he meets at a café. In Marseille and then in Paris, a woman helps her journalist husband figure out what is happening in his head as he experiences a peculiar stress disorder. Hovering on the fringe are the Marseillais, the shopkeepers, artists, café waiters. Who among them will save Noémie?

To the rhythm of European street life, each American puts a Marseille experience in the context of their own histories. It’s a love letter to the turbulence of Marseille, and to the turbulence to be found under the surface of each of us, the pounding hearts and jarring fears.

Read the opening chapter at Cagibi journal.

Find the book at your local bookstore — if not in stock, they can order it. Or order online:

If your library doesn’t have a copy, you can ask them to order it. Libraries typically have info on their website for how to make a request for a book that’s missing from their circulation.

If out of stock online, order directly from the publisher by emailing editor[at]palomapress[dot]net

For a signed copy, contact me. Limited supply available.

ISBN 978-1-7323025-2-5

Published April 9, 2019 by Paloma Press.