Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse takes the old figure of the urban wanderer — usually imagined as male, idle, observant, unbothered — and makes them a woman.

Moving through Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, Elkin blends memoir, cultural history, literary criticism and urban wandering into a study of women who have made the city legible by moving through it. She walks in the shoes of Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, George Sand, Sophie Calle, Martha Gellhorn, Agnès Varda, and of course, herself.

The pleasure is in its looseness; it's ambulatory, it thinks by walking. Elkin looks at who gets to loiter, who gets to look, who gets to disappear into a crowd, and who is always made visible by the act of moving alone. For readers of Deborah Levy, Olivia Laing, Rebecca Solnit, city essays, feminist literary criticism, Paris books that are not only about Paris, and theory-adjacent nonfiction that still has weather, shoes, streets and cafés in it.

Vintage paperback, first published by Chatto & Windus in 2016; this Vintage edition first published in 2017. Later printing, with number line visible. Good second-hand condition.