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Never Any End to Paris
Never Any End to Paris
Jan 14, 2026 7:46 PM

Author:Enrique Vila-Matas,Anne McLean

Never Any End to Paris

Trying to be Ernest Hemingway is never easy.

After reading A Moveable Feast, aspiring novelist Enrique Vila-Matas moves to Paris to be closer to his literary idol, Ernest Hemingway. Surrounded by the writers, artists and eccentrics of '70s Parisian café culture, he dresses in black, buys two pairs of reading glasses, and smokes a pipe like Sartre. Now, in later life, he reflects on his youth while giving a three-day lecture on irony. And he’s still convinced he looks like Hemingway.

Never Any End to Paris is a hilarious, playful novel about literature and the art of writing, and how life never quite goes to plan.

Reviews

A virtuoso balletic pas de deux of memory and imagination... There is something reminiscent in the fictional young Vila-Matas of Woody Allen... Not only does this novel glitter with sharp ideas and observations, it may just be the best book I've ever read about Paris.

—— TLS

Utterly compelling...breathtakingly accomplished... I was left satisfied, yet somehow wishing this captivating raconteur had continued indefinitely

—— Literary Review

By the end of it I was fully seduced by its self-portrait of the artist as a young writer... This wonderful book only reconfirms the never-ending-ness of Paris

—— Independent

Vila-Matas's touch is light and whimsical, while his allusions encompass a rogue's gallery of world literature

—— The Economist

One of Spain's most inventive and enjoyable novelists

—— Irish Examiner

The most important living Spanish author

—— Time Out New York

A strikingly original book

—— Cork Evening Echo

Entrancing

—— Christopher Hirst , Independent

An ironic anti-novel about the novel: it poses serious questions about the form’s limitations in being able to capture the protean reality of memory and identity but also argues for its continuing relevance (taking its cue from writers like Barthes, Perec and Queneau who appear in its pages) as a post-modernist game of ideas, a thought-provoking jeu d’esprit.

—— Oliver Dixon , Nudge

I just loved it. Lethally funny and so clever.

—— Jilly Cooper

I ADORED it. It's the most fun I've had with a book in a long time, and I love how she writes - so many dazzling sentences and phrases.

—— Marian Keyes

Sparkling savage and remarkably sexy.

—— Daisy Goodwin

A wickedly funny, biting satire of Notting Hill's basement-digging class. My absolute guiltiest read this summer.

—— Plum Sykes

The Jane Austen of W11

—— Scotsman on Winter Games

An addictively funny read about the lives of the rich and richer. Four stars

—— Heat on Notting Hell

Smart, pacy, and hysterically funny

—— Deirdre O’Brien , Sunday Mirror

This provocative debut explores whether monogamy is all it’s cracked up to be

—— Glamour

Witty, sparkling and a dissection of monogamy and happiness... Entertaining

—— Lady

Here is a heroine who scores a solid ten on the sass-o-meter, and she made the whole reading experience a hoot… Guilt-free fun with this deliciously rampant romp.

—— Sarah Hughes , Heat
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