The Paris Chronicles Books in Order

The Paris Chronicles are historical novels built around Anna, a young woman whose life becomes tangled up with Paris at one of the city’s most unsettled moments. City of Dreams begins in 1864, when Anna, the teenage daughter of a Russian furrier, marries the charming Emile Daubigny and moves to France expecting love, style, and security. Very quickly, she learns that dreams can be expensive.

What follows is not a tidy romance. It is a coming-of-age story about survival, friendship, money, class, and the hard education that comes when a young woman has to think for herself. When Anna is abandoned and forced into the rougher side of Parisian life, the city stops being a postcard and becomes something far more interesting. Its elegance is still there, but so are crowded rooms, debt, hunger, danger, and compromise.

Paris matters here as much as any character.

Steel writes the city in layers, from fashionable drawing rooms and glittering social occasions to poor districts under strain. She also places Anna’s personal story against the larger movement of history. War with Prussia, the siege of Paris, and the unrest that follows are not just background color. They shape Anna’s choices and change what kind of future is even possible. One of the pleasures of the series is seeing how public events land in private lives.

By the time Following the Dream begins, Paris is at peace but still marked by war and revolution. Anna is older, sadder, and more self-aware. She is living quietly with her mentor Edouard Blanchard, taking comfort in painting, and still unable to forget Antoine Clermont. The second book keeps the emotional stakes close while also opening onto a changing art world, especially as new ways of painting begin to challenge old ideas.

That gives the series its particular feel. These books have romance in them, but they are not only about romance. They are just as interested in work, loyalty, friendship, reinvention, and the question of what a decent life might look like after illusions fall away. Anna is the kind of heroine who becomes more interesting because life is hard on her. She grows, and that growth is the real spine of the story.

Even when events turn grim, the books are not bleak for the sake of it. They are interested in resilience, in the people who help when help is costly, and in the way art and beauty can still matter when the wider world is unstable. If you want nineteenth-century Paris with both glamour and grit, and a heroine whose story keeps moving, The Paris Chronicles offer exactly that.