City of love. City of splendour. City of terror. City of dreams. Inspired by the haunting, passionate story of the city of lights, this epic novel weaves a gripping tale of four families across the centuries: from the lies that spawn the noble line of de Cygne to the revolutionary Le Sourds who seek their destruction; from the Blanchards whose bourgeois respectability offers scant protection against scandal to the hard-working Gascons & their soaring ambitions. Over hundreds of years, these four families are bound by forbidden loves & marriages of convenience; dogged by vengeance & murderous secrets; torn apart by the irreconcilable differences of birth & faith, & brought together by the tumultuous history of their city. Paris bursts to life in the intrigue, corruption & glory of its people. Beloved author of Sarum, London & New York, Edward Rutherfurd illuminates Paris as only he can: capturing the romance & everyday drama of the men & women who, in two thousand years, transformed a humble trading post on the muddy banks of the Seine into the most celebrated city in the world.