Bastille Day

Greg Garrett, Professor of English

Veteran TV journalist Calvin Jones travels to Paris, where he negotiates love, friendship, and despair in award-winning novelist Greg Garrett’s Bastille Day.

With brilliant pacing and gorgeous prose, acclaimed novelist Greg Garrett tells the story of American TV journalist Calvin Jones, who travels to Paris to work with a producer friend he knows from their dark days covering the war in Iraq.

Cal Jones has had a quiet ten years, by design. After surviving the loss of two people he loved in the Iraq war, which he covered as a national correspondent, he fell apart and retreated to a local news job in Texas. Cal is still wrestling with those old demons when he goes to Paris to work with an old friend and encounters Nadia, a brilliant, lovely, and sad Saudi Muslim woman in Paris with plans to wed a Saudi sheikh in a family-arranged marriage.

Against his own better judgment, Cal falls for Nadia, even dragging her from the Seine when she attempts to solve her insoluble problem by taking her own life. He begins to risk a heart he thought was too badly broken to ever love again, and as the wedding ticks closer, to hope that perhaps Nadia can make a choice that includes him. Then their time rescuing each other is interrupted by the terror attack in Nice, which Cal is called out to cover. Back in that setting, Cal is thrown back into the memories of senseless violence and extremism that shattered him in Iraq—and that threaten to shatter him and his hopes now.

Garrett's characters wrestle with the ghosts of their pasts, as they long for love, friendship, and faith in the present. Bastille Day is a gloriously-affecting novel about how our histories can damage us, but hope can heal us.

Paraclete Press, 2023

ISBN 9781640607514

"A remarkable novelist who has the courage to explore in classic terms the great theme of the human soul." —Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
 
"Garrett writes with intelligence, with wit, with humor, with obvious affection for his characters, with an eye for salient detail." —Elinor Lipman, author of Good Riddance
 
"Garrett creates characters who are whole and complex." —Library Journal
 
"An astonishingly gifted writer." —Dennis Covington, National Book Award Finalist for Salvation on Sand Mountain