Coco at the Ritz

 A riveting and prismatic novel of the eternally enigmatic Coco Chanel at the end of World War II.  

Though her name is synonymous with elegance and chic, the iconic Coco  Chanel had a complicated dark side, and in late August 1944, as World  War II drew to a close, she was arrested and interrogated on charges of  treason to France. 

Many of the facts are lost to history, partly through Chanel's own  obfuscation, but this much is known: the charges grew out of her  war-time romance with a German spy, and one morning two soldiers from  the French Forces of the Interior—the loose band of Resistance fighters,  soldiers and private citizens who took up arms in the wake of the  Liberation of Paris—led Chanel from her suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris  to an undisclosed location for questioning.

What transpired during her interrogation, who was present, and why  she was set free when so many other women who’d been involved with  German men (willingly or otherwise) had their heads shaved or were  imprisoned, remains a mystery. 

In this brilliantly insightful and compulsively readable novel from  the author of I am Madame X, Gioia Diliberto explores the motivations of  this complex woman and portrays the gripping battle of wits that could  have been her interrogation. Was Chanel truly a collaborator?  

Though the Occupation of France offered a stark contrast  between good and evil, few people are wholly heroes or villains in  wartime. Most citizens, as the writer André Gide noted, were like old  shoes floating in murky waters: battered and torn, riding the turbulent  flow, just trying to survive.   By turns raw and vulnerable, steely and flawed, Chanel emerges from  these pages as a woman who owns her decisions, no matter the  consequences.  Rich with history and filled with emotional truths, Coco  at the Ritz is a story about the choices one woman made when the stakes  were the highest. In today’s world, it is a cautionary tale about the  necessity of standing against evil when it stares you in the face.