The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau

The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau is a 2025 work of historical fiction by Kristen Harmel. Harmel is the best-selling author of several other novels that have a historical basis in France during World War II, including The Sweetness of Forgetting, The Book of Lost Names, The Forest of Vanishing Stars, and The Paris Daughter. The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau combines several of Harmel’s favorite premises, including fraught relationships between women, long-held secrets, and late-in-life romantic love. The book’s debut on the New York Times bestseller list reflects the enduringly popular interest in World War II in the historical fiction and women’s fiction genres.

The novel has two timelines. In the near-present, Colette Marceau’s accomplished life as a jewel thief begins to unravel when a bracelet that disappeared with her sister, who was murdered decades earlier, comes to light. The historical timeline, set in 1930s and 1940s Paris, follows the tragedies that beset Colette’s family and friends in German-occupied Paris during World War II. Uniting the timelines are themes of The Obligation to Resist Injustice, Upholding Family Tradition and Leaving a Legacy, and The Relief of Revealing Secrets as Colette resolves the mystery and the tragedies that have haunted her for most of her life.

This guide consults the hardcover edition published by Gallery Books in 2025.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of religious discrimination, death (including child death), graphic violence, and pregnancy loss.

Plot Summary

The novel unfolds in a dual timeline, alternating between Paris in the decades before and during World War II and Boston, Massachusetts, in 2018. The point of view is close third person, narrated most often through the titular character, Colette Marceau, but at times shared with her mother (Annabel), her friend (Aviva), and her sister (Liliane).

In the Prologue, set in 1927 Paris, Jewish diamond merchant Salomon Rosman commissions his friend, talented jeweler Max Besner, to make a set of jewels that his wife, Hélène, can wear and can also pass on to their newborn twins, Ruth and Daniel. Max creates a two-piece bracelet in a design that, when separated, resembles lilies, but together creates a butterfly. Hélène treasures the bracelets, but a German Nazi official named Möckel takes them when the family is forced from their home in 1942.

In 2018, 89-year-old Colette Marceau attends a charity gala and steals a valuable ring from a speaker who supports a neo-Nazi movement. Colette is an accomplished jewel thief, taught by her mother, Annabel, who married a French schoolmaster and moved to Paris from England. Annabel claimed to be a descendant of Robin Hood and told her daughters stories of Robin Hood and the eagle who guarded him with a distinctive warning cry.

Colette lives alone and has no children, but she took in a friend’s daughter, Aviva, when the girl lost her mother, and the two are close. After a detective visits her home, Colette tells Aviva that she’s a jewel thief but abides by a strict code: She robs only from the cruel or unkind and uses the thefts to fund good causes. For example, she anonymously founded the Boston Center for Holocaust Education, where she and Aviva volunteer. Colette is good friends with her broker, Marty Weaver, who sells the jewels she steals. One day, Marty surprises Colette with news that he found a piece of jewelry she has been looking for, a diamond bracelet in the shape of a lily. It will be on display in the Diamond Museum in Boston. Marty doesn’t know that Colette has the other half of this bracelet. She feels that if she can reunite the two pieces, she can lay to rest her guilt over losing her mother and sister in World War II.

In flashbacks to Paris, Colette’s mother, Annabel, teaches her to be a thief. One night at the opera, Colette sees a performance of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and is deeply moved by the story. When the Nazi army invades France, Annabel begins stealing jewels to fund the efforts of the French Resistance. Colette wants to help and steals a bracelet from a dressmaker who is a Nazi collaborator. She’s chased, but a boy wearing a yellow star that identifies him as Jewish rescues her and shows her a hiding place for the bracelet. The boy begins leaving her poems, signed with the name Tristan, and Colette writes back, signing as Isolde. Though she doesn’t see him again, she falls in love with him through their letters.

In the present-day storyline, Colette asks Aviva to find out who owns the bracelet. Aviva approaches the director of the Diamond Museum, Lucas O’Mara, who tells her that the owner wishes to remain anonymous. Colette, along with Aviva, attends a reception for the opening of the museum exhibit and is moved to see the bracelet on display. She guesses that the bracelet belongs to the family. Aviva discovers that the bracelet was in the possession of Hubert Verdier, the father of Lucas’s deceased wife. When Colette visits Hubert to question him, however, he won’t tell her how he came by the bracelet. Then she receives a surprising call from Daniel Rosman, who decides to come to Boston.

In July 1942, the Marceaus are horrified to witness the French police taking thousands of Jews into custody and imprisoning them in the Vélodrome d’Hiv. Annabel takes her daughters to try to visit Hélène, who gives Annabel an emerald ring to keep for her. Annabel vows to find Hélène’s bracelets, and when she does, she steals them from the woman Möckel gifted them to. She’s seen and pursed, however. When she makes it back to her apartment, she sews one half of the bracelet into the hem of each of her daughters’ nightgowns for safekeeping. Tristan has disappeared, and Colette fears that he was taken in the roundup.

One night in July, Möckel comes to their house. Colette helps Liliane out the window, but she’s caught by the officers arresting her mother and father. Colette sees a man in uniform carrying Liliane down the street. Annabel, separated from her daughters at the prison, is interrogated and then killed by Möckel when she won’t reveal to him where she hid the bracelets. Colette and her father are released but learn that Liliane’s body was found floating in the Seine. Colette’s father, devastated, leaves her in the care of family friends. She spends the remainder of the war with them, stealing to support the same network her mother supported, until her Uncle Leo takes her to England and eventually the US.

In 2018, Colette has a strange sense of familiarity when she meets Daniel Rosman and feels immediately comfortable with him. She gives him her half of the bracelet, feeling that she is, in part, fulfilling her mother’s wishes, even if she couldn’t save Liliane. Colette and Daniel can’t learn anything more from Hubert Verdier. Aviva meets Lucas’s grandfather, Bill Carpenter, but he asks them not to stir up the past. When Hubert has a heart attack and dies, Colette fears that she’ll never know the truth about her sister.

Colette accompanies Daniel to Paris for a brief visit to Max Besner’s grand-nephew, who has documents showing the Rosmans’ ownership of the original bracelets. While in Paris, Colette visits the hiding place she shared with Tristan and is astonished to find a letter from him dated 1952. She was certain he died in Auschwitz and feels sorrow at losing him all over again.

At Hubert’s funeral, Colette meets Bill Carpenter and receives an enormous shock: He’s Guillaume Charpentier, a policeman she and her family knew in Paris. Bill admits that he came to the Marceaus’ apartment that night to try to warn them that the Germans were coming. Seeing Liliane alone outside, he fled with her so that the Germans couldn’t take her. His wife, Francine, found the bracelet in Liliane’s nightgown and insisted that they keep both the bracelet and Liliane, since she longed for a child. Bill believed that the Germans killed the rest of the Marceau family and that he was saving Liliane’s life by adopting her. Hubert Verdier helped them move to the US, demanding the bracelet in return. Liliane married and had a son, Lucas. She now lives in Vermont.

Colette and Liliane emotionally reunite, and Colette, who thought she had only Aviva, now has a much larger family, including Liliane, Lucas, and his daughter, Millie. She also has Daniel, whom she discovers is her childhood love, Tristan. They marry, and for a wedding ring, Daniel gives her Hélène’s emerald ring, which Colette sold to fund the Holocaust Center but, with Marty’s help, recovered. Colette has made peace with the past and looks forward to the continuation of her family’s legacy, thanks to the bracelets that brought them all together.