Sixty-year-old penniless Manhattan socialite Frances Price had a plan. To die before the money ran out, but things didn't go as planned. Her husband Franklin has been dead for twelve years and with his vast inheritance gone, she cashes in the last of her possessions and resolves to live out her twilight days anonymously in a borrowed apartment in Paris. She is accompanied by her directionless son Malcolm and a cat named Small Frank, who may or may not embody the spirit of Frances's dead husband.

Sixty-year-old penniless Manhattan socialite Frances Price had a plan. To die before the money ran out, but things didn't go as planned. Her husband Franklin has been dead for twelve years and with his vast inheritance gone, she cashes in the last of her possessions and resolves to live out her twilight days anonymously in a borrowed apartment in Paris. She is accompanied by her directionless son Malcolm and a cat named Small Frank, who may or may not embody the spirit of Frances' dead husband.

Frances Price--tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature--is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son, Malcolm, is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. Putting penury and pariahdom behind them, the family decides to cut their losses and head for the exit. One ocean voyage later, they land in their beloved Paris, the City of Lights serving as a backdrop not for love or romance, but self-destruction and economic ruin--to riotous effect.

A brilliant and darkly comic novel about a wealthy widow and her adult son who flee New York for Paris in the wake of scandal and financial disintegration.

Bankrupted by her infamous litigator husband's tabloid death, a scandal-fearing widow flees New York for Paris, where she and her deadbeat son navigate near-comic self-destructive choices.

"From bestselling author Patrick deWitt, a brilliant and darkly comic novel about a wealthy widow and her adult son who flee New York for Paris in the wake of scandal and financial disintegration. Frances Price-- tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature-- is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son Malcolm is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there's the Price's aging cat, Small Frank, who Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamously immoral litigator and world-class cad whose gruesome tabloid death rendered Frances and Malcolm social outcasts. Putting penury and pariahdom behind them, the family decides to cut their losses and head for the exit. One ocean voyage later, the curious trio land in their beloved Paris, the City of Light serving as a backdrop not for love or romance, but self destruction and economical ruin-- to riotous effect. A number of singular charact