Belleville is the working-class neighborhood in Paris where Emma Morley makes a deliberate break from her life in London and sets out to write. Rather than treating the city as a picturesque backdrop, the novel places her in a lively, inexpensive, multicultural district, making Belleville part of her effort to turn an imagined adventure into an actual change of life.

Setting and Character

Emma chooses a small two-room flat in the 19th arrondissement, on the edge of Belleville and Ménilmontant. The location keeps her away from tourist landmarks and from the polished, familiar image of Paris. She describes the area as lively, cheap, and multicultural, then catches herself reaching for the word “real”—a choice that makes her sound, in her own view, like a student rather than a thirty-five-year-old woman. Her self-consciousness captures the gap between the romantic idea of moving to Paris and the ordinary, imperfect life she is trying to build there.

Emma’s Writing Summer

The move begins as an idea that Emma considers almost embarrassingly precious. Tired of married couples assuring her that she could visit Paris whenever she liked, she decides to go rather than keep imagining it. London has come to feel like one enormous crèche, and Belleville offers distance from other people’s children as well as room for an adventure. Emma is commercially successful as a writer of teenage fiction, but she measures her work against the city’s literary associations; settling away from tourist Paris lets her pursue writing without pretending that her own life resembles the lives of the writers she admires.

Place in the Narrative

Belleville also anchors the reunion with Dexter Mayhew. On Sunday 15 July 2001, Emma waits for him at the Gare du Nord as his train arrives from London. The novel identifies Belleville as the Paris setting for this encounter, connecting Emma’s chosen home with the return of a relationship that reaches back beyond her new life there. The neighborhood is therefore more than a setting for her writing retreat: it is the place where her independent experiment and her history with Dexter meet.