# The 19 Best Novels Set in Paris

> Nineteenth-century Paris and expatriate Paris share one bracket, plus a memoir or two that read like fiction.

*By YPB Team · Published September 8, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-19-best-novels-set-in-paris*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **A Moveable Feast** — score 1000/1000
   Hemingway's posthumous account of his poor, productive 1920s in Paris, and of the friends he later filleted in print.
2. **Perfume** — score 756/1000
   Patrick Süskind's 1985 novel of a scentless murderer born in the stink of eighteenth-century Paris.
3. **The Three Musketeers** — score 664/1000
   Dumas's 1844 adventure of d'Artagnan arriving in Paris to join the king's guard.
4. **Sentimental Education** — score 596/1000
   Flaubert's 1869 novel of Frédéric Moreau drifting through Paris and the 1848 revolution.
5. **A Tale of Two Cities** — score 596/1000
   Dickens's 1859 novel of the Revolution, split between London and a Paris of tribunals and the guillotine.
6. **The Elegance of the Hedgehog** — score 596/1000
   Muriel Barbery's 2006 novel of a concierge and a clever girl in a rue de Grenelle building.
7. **Les Misérables** — score 517/1000
   Hugo's 1862 epic of Jean Valjean, the barricades and the Paris sewers.
8. **Bel-Ami** — score 517/1000
   Maupassant's 1885 novel of a penniless ex-soldier climbing Paris journalism through women.
9. **Tender Is the Night** — score 517/1000
   Fitzgerald's 1934 novel of an American psychiatrist unravelling between Paris and the Riviera.
10. **Tropic of Cancer** — score 517/1000
   Henry Miller's 1934 autobiographical novel of hunger and appetite in expatriate Paris, banned in the US for decades.
11. **The Sun Also Rises** — score 517/1000
   Hemingway's 1926 debut, which starts in the Left Bank cafés before the run to Pamplona.
12. **The Phantom of the Opera** — score 423/1000
   Leroux's 1910 gothic mystery beneath and above the Palais Garnier.
13. **The Count of Monte Cristo** — score 423/1000
   Dumas's 1844 revenge novel, whose long second half plays out in Parisian salons.
14. **Nana** — score 423/1000
   Zola's 1880 novel of a theatre actress who ruins the men of the Second Empire.
15. **Suite Française** — score 310/1000
   Irène Némirovsky's novel of the 1940 exodus and occupation, published sixty years after she died at Auschwitz.
16. **Giovanni's Room** — score 310/1000
   James Baldwin's 1956 novel of an American in Paris who cannot admit what he wants.
17. **Down and Out in Paris and London** — score 310/1000
   Orwell's 1933 account of dishwashing in Paris hotel kitchens and sleeping rough.
18. **Le Père Goriot** — score 172/1000
   Balzac's 1835 boarding-house novel, where young Rastignac learns what Paris costs.
19. **The Hunchback of Notre-Dame** — score 172/1000
   Hugo's 1831 novel of Quasimodo and Esmeralda, written partly to save the cathedral itself.

Tags: books, france, classics, paris