The Mysterious Bakery On Rue De Paris

Content Warning: This section includes discussions of death, substance abuse, racism (specifically anti-Romani attitudes and slurs), anti-gay bias, and the German death camps during WWII.

Edith Lane is the protagonist and first-person narrator of the novel. She is a 30-year-old Irish woman who has spent her adult life caring for her mother with cystic fibrosis. At the beginning of the novel, it has been 18 months since her mother died and Edith impulsively leaves her home in Ireland for a job in France.

Edith feels stuck and lost, unable to move past her mother’s death or find direction in her life. She uses her caregiver role as an excuse to avoid any other decisions in her life and now that her mother is gone she no longer has a purpose. She hopes that the sudden move to France will shake something loose inside her and help her discover what she wants and what she is meant to do. Additionally, she feels “out of step with [her] peers” (58), stemming from the time she spent with her mother watching old movies and listening to old music. Edith’s obsession with movies, particularly those set in France, influences her perceptions of life, inspiring idealized visions of what her life should look like that often clash with the realities of the world, which contributes to the theme of