Books like Sketches from memory by Edmund White

Set in 1950s Paris, James Baldwin’s novel follows an American expatriate entangled in a doomed love triangle, confronting desire, morality, and sexual identity with stark honesty.

A cunning con man teams with an orphaned apprentice to swindle a wealthy heiress, but when the apprentice grows attached, the plot spirals into betrayal, deception and unexpected affection in a grim London slum.

Jeanette Winterson's debut novel follows a young woman's journey of faith and self-discovery.

After a twenty‑year friendship ends, Arthur Greer is invited to his ex‑boyfriend’s wedding and embarks on a globe‑spanning trip that reconnects him with a past love, tests his courage and forces a fresh start at fifty.

Posthumously published, Hemingway’s *A Moveable Feast* is a memoir of his Paris years in the 1920s, detailing his early career, intimate relationships, and encounters with other literary figures of the Lost Generation.

A romantic novel about a talented woman of aristocratic background who defies Victorian expectations and commercial success while pursuing her love for other women.

David Lebovitz recounts renovating his Paris apartment, weaving humor, recipes, and life lessons into a vivid portrait of American life in France.

"Part memoir, part travelogue, part love letter to the people who live and work on a magical street in Paris. Elaine Sciolino, the former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, invites us on a tour of her favorite Parisian street, offering an homage to street life and the pleasures of Parisian living. 'I can never be sad on the rue des Martyrs,' Sciolino explains, as she celebrates the neighborhood's rich history and vibrant lives. While many cities suffer from the leveling effects of globalization, the rue des Martyrs maintains its distinct allure. On this street, the patron saint of France was beheaded and the Jesuits took their first vows. It was here that Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted circus acrobats, �Emile Zola situated a lesbian dinner club in his novel Nana, and Fran�cois Truffaut filmed scenes from The 400 Blows. Sciolino reveals the charms and idiosyncrasies of this street and its longtime residents--the Tunisian greengrocer, the husband-and-wife cheesemongers, the showman who's been running a transvestite cabaret for more than half a century, the owner of a hundred-year-old bookstore, the woman who repairs eighteenth-century mercury barometers--bringing Paris alive in all of its unique majesty. The Only Street in Paris will make readers hungry for Paris, for cheese and wine, and for the kind of street life that is all too quickly disappearing"--Provided by publisher.

American Elizabeth Bard recounts her transformative week in Paris, where she falls in love with both a Frenchman and the local cuisine, exploring food, romance, and cultural immersion in the city’s markets and bistros.

When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising--and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink--The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age.

Sylvia Beach, the pioneering bookseller who opened Shakespeare and Company in Paris, is brought to life through a meticulous biography that traces the intellectual circle of the Lost Generation which gathered at her shop.

Kate Betts chronicles her 1980s Parisian debut as a fashion journalist, blending memoir, travel, and insider fashion lore amid the era’s shifting creative landscape.