8. Lunch in Paris: a Love Story, With Recipes by Elizabeth Bard

Bard is working as a journalist in London and taking weekend trips to Paris when she meets her future husband, Gwendal. Besides a physical attraction to Gwendal (Bard famously writes on the first page that she slept with her husband halfway through their first date), she also is slowly growing in love with the famous city. She is soon spending more and more time in Paris spending leisurely afternoons at cafes and the street markets, and when Gwendal puts her name on the gas bill for his Parisian apartment, she knows that she is meant to live there.

Part love story and part food story, this book comes complete with relevant recipes at the end of each chapter. Bard starts out as an unsure American living in a foreign city with no job, no heat during the winter, and cooking on a tiny two-burner stove, and progresses into a wife that helps her husband grieve over the death of his beloved father and bring their two different families together. A quick, fun read for those who liked Amanda Hesser’s Cooking for Mr. Latte and the traveling writings of Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes, or lovers of everything French.