bAn entertaining and openhearted tale of a naf eventually getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel society - at least a little.b p When Simon Kuper left London for Paris in his early thirties, he wasn't planning to make a permanent move. Paris, however, had other br plans. Kuper has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, seen his American wife through life-threatening cancer, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city's notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on their neighborhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change. p This century, it has globalized, gentrified, and been shocked into realizing its role as the crucible of civilizational conflict. Sometimes it's a multicultural paradise, and sometimes it isn't. This decade, Parisians have lived through a sequence of shocks terrorist attacks, record fl