On Sale: Oct 20, 2026
Page Count: 320 pages
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN-13: 9781538757574

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$19.99 CAD

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A sweeping and cinematic narrative history that follows Renoir’s La Petite Irène, tracing its theft from one of Paris’s wealthiest Jewish families during WWII and the fate of the girl it immortalized.

In 1941, a specialized German looting unit raided the Chambord chateau in the Loire Valley of France and plundered one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s most haunting masterworks: La Petite Irène. The portrait would enchant or curse nearly everyone who coveted it, but the living, breathing girl it depicted slipped from view. This is her story.

She was Irène Cahen d’Anvers, born into Belle Époque privilege and a wealthy Jewish dynasty. Defiant by nature, she abandoned her religion and her arranged marriage, becoming a figure at once scandalous, elusive and resilient.

As the Occupation gripped Paris, her family was targeted, persecuted and deported — punished for demanding the return of what had been stolen. Irène survived by hiding in plain sight, while questions lingered decades later about how and why.

Drawing on newly uncovered documents, newspaper accounts, and archival records, Doreen Carvajal reconstructs the intertwined journeys of a woman and a painting that was seized by the Nazis, traded through a shadowy art market, and pursued by a powerful collector. Their paths converge in a story of beauty and betrayal—the painting a silent witness to what history tried to erase.

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Doreen Carvajal was born and raised in California. She studied journalism as an undergraduate at The University of California at Berkeley and San Jose State University. She worked as a journalist for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times and other publications for more than 25 years, covering a myriad of topics. Her first book, The Forgetting River, was about her search to recover her Catholic family's hidden Sephardic Jewish roots in a mystical white pueblo on Spain's southern frontier in Andalusia.

Doreen Carvajal

About the Author

Doreen Carvajal was born and raised in California. She studied journalism as an undergraduate at The University of California at Berkeley and San Jose State University. She worked as a journalist for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times and other publications for more than 25 years, covering a myriad of topics. Her first book, The Forgetting River, was about her search to recover her Catholic family’s hidden Sephardic Jewish roots in a mystical white pueblo on Spain’s southern frontier in Andalusia.

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