Opulent, emotional and irresistible: the inspirational story of Gustave Eiffel’s daughter.
MADEMOISELLE EIFFEL UND DER TURM DER LIEBE
(Mademoiselle Eiffel and the Tower of Love)
by Sophie Villard
Penguin Germany, April 2023
Paris, 1887. Gustave Eiffel wants to build the tallest tower in the world, yet no one seems to have faith that his absurd steel colossus will be finished in time for the World’s Fair – except, that is, for his bold daughter Claire. At a time when it is still thought unseemly for a woman to go for a walk on her own, she is her father’s most valued advisor. But Eiffel has to contend with more than deadlines. Paris’s cultural elite, led by Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas, think their city is being mutilated, and are taking a stand. Claire has her own worries too: her husband, young engineer Adolphe, is in charge of the high-risk construction of the tower’s top, and her fears for his safety are threatening to destroy their marriage. Then a worker is killed in a fall, and Claire meets handsome reporter Gordon Bennett, who promises her a carefree new life in America. Will she choose the Eiffel Tower, or a future in the New World?
Sophie Villard is the pen name of a successful German author. She studied journalism and political science, and lives near Dresden with her family. Her novel about the famous art collector Peggy Guggenheim was a Spiegel bestseller.
Cressi Catterberg is freshly in love with gorgeous Mika. She feels that he might be the one – if only she didn’t suffer from commitment-phobia. And if only she wasn’t convinced that her true love is actually Mr Lindholm, her therapist. Emotional upheaval is just one of her problems: there’s her family too – or rather, her two sisters and three aunts, who constantly stick their nose into her business. But most of her energy is taken up with the café she has inherited from her mother, for which she has big plans. Mr Lindholm and Cressi’s aunts know it’s time Cressi started believing in herself – and in Mika.
Danzig, 1856. When young Johanna Berendt finds herself standing in front of the big villa in Langgasse Street, she feels deeply embarrassed. She eloped with a pianist just a few months ago, but now she’s back and hoping that her family will forgive her. Yet a shock awaits Johanna: her father has died, and her brother is now in charge of the family and their long-established merchant business. And he has no time for his freedom-loving sister.
Taxidermist Sonja lives all on her own deep in the woods. She avoids all human contact like the plague, and the inhabitants of the nearby village are in any case convinced she’s a witch. Her clientele is mostly rather suspect, and many of the jobs they give her are unpleasant and illegal. When she meets a young man and feels herself falling for him, she decides to escape her hermit’s life. To do that, she first has to take on one last well-paid and very, very illegal job. But then long-buried trauma and family secrets raise their head – and soon she is not the only one who’s in mortal danger…
A model Nazi mother who teaches others how to raise their children while refusing to speak of the great loss she has suffered; a cook travelling across Germany in the summer of 1945 who would rather make love to women than to her employer; a lawyer and single mother who unexpectedly inherits a flat in Wrocław and discovers a hitherto unknown Polish branch of her family – these women are all bound together by a century of war and post-war life, flight, expulsion and violence.