When Edmund White moved to Paris in 1983, he was forty-three years old, couldn't speak French and knew just two people in the entire city, but soon discovered the anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. When he left, fifteen years later, to return to the US, he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio and TV, and as a journalist had made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves St Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michel Foucault. He'd also developed a close friendship with an older woman, Marie-Claude, through whom he'd come to a deeper understanding of French life and culture.

The book's title evokes the Parisian landscape in the half-light and eternal mists; the serenity of the city compared with the New York White had known (and vividly recalled in City Boy). White fell passionately in love with the city and its culture: intoxicated and intellectually stimulated. He became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet; he wrote lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; he became a recipient of the French Order of Arts and Letters.

Inside a Pearl recalls those fertile years, and offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.