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About
Written between 2019 and 2024, Portraits from Paris is a novelized memoir of a boarding-school childhood in 1970s England, interspersed with journalistic sketches of cities as diverse as Montevideo, Kolkata, and Moscow that draw from the travel-studded years between school and the author's move to France. Along the way, Gavin Cologne-Brookes reflects on historic events ranging from Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the death of the queen, the restoration of Notre-Dame, and the Paris Olympics. Binding the personal and political together is an oil painter's rendering of his creative evolution, building with careful brushwork upon the tints of the craft's discovery in adolescence to arrive at the nuanced hues of artistic maturity.
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Reviews
"The brutality of school opens the reader's heart (and eyes) to the brutality that lies behind so much of the art that Cologne-Brookes observes. . . . A powerful memoir that dramatizes a dynamic interplay between art, temporality, and the self."
Mimi Thebo, author of Dreaming the Bear
"With his astonishing powers of recall, Gavin Cologne-Brookes packs the schooldays sections of Portraits from Paris with insight and accurate observation. . . . An engaging and uplifting account of a life in search of liberty."
Richard Beard, author of The Day That Went Missing and Sad Little Men
"Cologne-Brookes has lived a remarkable life and is a gifted storyteller. The writing thrums with energy and color and humor. . . . The whole insightful performance is embedded to a quite extraordinary degree in artistic and literary lore. Stunning."
Jonathan Carr, author of Make Me a City