About this item
The heartwarming story of a young girl sent to live with the extraordinary Murphy Family in southern France.. Ten-year-old Alice Atherton is sent by her father to spend the summer with his dear friends the Murphys who live with their three children and pet monkey in the French Riveria. There, Alice will meet and learn from some of the most extraordinary luminaries of the time. She visits a junk yard with Pablo Picasso looking for objects to make into art, performs a dance inspired by celestial bodies with the renowned Ballet Russes, and imagines magical adventures with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald.. An uplifting story that will appeal to readers who love books by authors like Kate DiCamillo and Jeanne Birdsall.
About the Author
Lesley M. M. Blume is an award-winning journalist, historian, and New York Times bestselling author. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, WSJ Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, Vogue, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Slate, and Departures, among other publications.Blume is currently completing her second major non-fiction book, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World. It will be released by Simon & Schuster in August, 2020 to mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Fallout tells the story of how one intrepid American correspondent helped expose the deadliest government cover-up of the 20th century: the true effects of the nuclear bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This harrowing and engrossing story will remind readers about the ghastly realities of nuclear warfare, and of the essentialness of independent investigative journalism. In 2016, Eamon Dolan Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt released Blume's book Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises to commemorate the 90th anniversary of Sun's 1926 release. Reviewers lauded Everybody Behaves Badly as "essential ... a page-turner," "magnificently reported," "fiendishly readable," "riveting," and "the best book on Hemingway in Paris since A Moveable Feast." The book was a Washington Post notable book of 2016 and became a New York Times best seller shortly after its publication.It has sold foreign editions around the world, including in Germany, Russia, and China. Blume has also served as literary executor of the estate of editor, bookseller, and Lost Generation icon Sylvia Beach, founder and owner of Paris's Shakespeare and Company bookstore and library, and original publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses.Blume's previous nonfiction books include Let's Bring Back (Chronicle Books, 2010) , a cultural encyclopedia celebrating hundreds of forgotten objects, pastimes, fashions, delectables, and personalities from bygone eras. A call for a return to civility, it was deemed "whimsical ... comical ... [and] delightful" by The New Yorker and celebrated by scores of other magazines, newspapers, and broadcasts.Following the success of this initial edition, Chronicle released additional topic-specific Let's Bring Back volumes. Blume also wrote It Happened Here (Thornwillow Press, 2011) , a book detailing the raucous cultural history of New York City's St. Regis Hotel. The book was the inaugural volume of Thornwillow's "Libretto series," which showcases the work of literary lions past and present, including Peter Matthiessen, Adam Gopnik, and Lewis Lapham. For the amusement of young readers, Blume has authored four critically-acclaimed novels and two collections of short stories,
