Francine Prose

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

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This novel, set in the decades surrounding World War II, is named after the title of a photograph that appears in the story. The photo features Lou, a queer Parisian woman, and her lover Arlette. Various narrators help the reader piece together the way in which Lou, rejected by her parents and subjected to sexual violence and bigotry as a young person, eventually becomes an agent of the Nazi regime. The novel is about attachment disorder and the repercussions of childhood trauma. It grapples with the question of how a victim comes to side with the aggressors and tests the reader’s compassion for a victim who turned perpetrator.