Rooftoppers

The majestic rooftops of 19th-century Paris are the magical setting for Katherine Rundell’s Rooftoppers, a coming-of-age story suffused with the baroque wonder of picturesque cities and skylines. The novel’s heroine, a 12-year-old foundling named Sophie, arrives in Paris to search for her mother and discovers a secret community of “sky-treaders”—ragamuffins who eke out a death-defying existence on the city’s windswept roofs, trees, bridges, and train stations. The “spring”-legged Matteo, who has not set foot on the ground in years, has forged a life for himself in the bleak valleys and peaks of Paris’s slate, tile, and zinc rooftops, like Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Rundell’s novel is, in large part, a love letter to these iconic features of Parisian architecture, the elegance of which is inseparable from the city’s storied ambience.

Schooling Sophie in the art of rooftopping (traversing the city by roof instead of by street), Matteo warns her that “[p]oor buildings are usually pointed; rich buildings are usually flat” (138). As an afficionado of roof surfaces, which are highly regimented in Paris, Matteo knows whereof he speaks.