ten novels and essays not to be missed in January 2025

Justine Augier, Éric Reinhardt, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse… Discover our selection of unmissable Books to obtain in small format.

“Believe”, by Justine Augier

We find, in Believe, the beautiful book by Justine Augier, this quote from Annie Ernaux, which could be an emblem: “There are many books which have literary value for me, although they are not classified as literature, texts by Michel Foucault, Bourdieu, for example. It is the upheaval, the sensation of opening, of enlargement, which makes literature for me. » The sensation of opening, widening and elevation of the gaze – and of thought – grows irresistibly as one advances in reading this serious essay, in which the thread of Justine Augier’s ideas undulates with lucidity, and a gentle stubbornness. — Na.C.

Ed. Babel, €7.40.

“The Wager Shipwrecks”, by David Grann

As he attacks this new century, David Grann has become the master of a major genre of American literature, the « narrative non-fiction » where Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joseph Mitchell and his absolute model John Hersey shone. The history of Wager has been told many times. By searching the sources, by probing the nature of memory, by confronting several antagonistic stories, the writer-journalist has not only produced the most astonishing of reconstructions. He exposed social relations under the influence of suffering and “ravages of imperialism, racism, bureaucratic contempt and the most raw greed”. — L.R.

Ed. Points, €10.40.

“The Exchequer”, by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

The first autobiographical essay by a novelist who has long, artfully told his story is made up of the same number of chapters as there are squares in a chess game. Sixty-four. Some are short, in white, dazzling writing, others stretch, carried away by the twists and turns of memory and the sudden glow which clarifies the contours of erased figures. Jean-Philippe Toussaint was a player for a long time, chess devoured his youth — “their symbolism, their romanticism, their reassuring abstraction have always been intimately intertwined with writing for me”. — L.R.

Ed. Midnight-Double, €9.50.

“The Convoy”, by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse

From April 7 to July 17, 1994, it is estimated that eight hundred thousand inhabitants of Rwanda, men, women and children, the vast majority Tutsi, were murdered by Hutu killers. This mass crime escaped the thousand children exfiltrated from the country during a few humanitarian convoys. Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse is one of these survivors, who was 15 years old at the time and was able to leave the country with her mother in the June 18 convoy. Her story retraces the difficult investigation, lasting fifteen years, that she undertook to try to find the other children in this convoy and share with them four photos taken during their evacuation, four images which trace and attest to their “miraculous survival”. — Na.C.

Ed. I read, €8.00.

“Sarah, Susanne and the writer”, by Éric Reinhardt

There are therefore Sarah, Susanne and the writer, three characters to share the leading roles in Eric Reinhardt’s novel, to which they give its choral title. Let’s start with Sarah and the writer, since one of the narrative threads that supports and advances the plot is their dialogue: to this author whom she admires, Sarah told her story. That of a rather happy woman, but clearly not enough, or not fully enough, who one day finds herself caught in her own trap after having wanted, with a gesture whose consequences she did not imagine, to jostle a very lazy person. -be domestic. — Na.C.

Ed. Folio, €9.50.

“The indigenous house”, by Claro

It took a long time of repression and maturation, then a multitude of chances got involved, for Claro to agree to push the door and enter, “backwards, hoping that the wall of this house will have the warmth of a friendly chest.” And yet, held back by an ultimate inability to really make the journey, he never went as far as Algiers, where the twists and turns of the Native House, built in 1930 according to the drawings of his architect grandfather, remain. the occasion of the centenary of the French presence in Algeria. This book is the captivating account of the inner miles that Claro traveled while braving his own resistance. — M.L.

“Okavango”, by Caryl Férey

Adventure around the corner is not his style. Caryl Férey sees far, to write thrillers in which social and political violence hits hard. New Zealand, Argentina, Siberia or Chile, he puts down his backpack and settles down for long-term investigations which will become realistic fictions, constructed with a straight line. This time he went to Africa, to Namibia, to reserves where wild animals are still numerous and protected like milk on fire. But we also come across poaching mafias, a trafficker nicknamed the Scorpion, animals mutilated by crazy people and above all a muscular ranger who is not afraid. — C.F.

Ed. Police Folio, €10.00.

“Three women disappear”, by Hélène Frappat

Impulsive, relentless, this investigation catapults an icy plaster to the place of the heart where we were so warm, where we were so comfortable. It sows a disturbing inner discord, calls into question years of cinematic bliss, of conditioning by the “male gaze”. A former film critic, the novelist Hélène Frappat herself experienced this disaster of revelation deep down, and this is undoubtedly what gives the strength of her story in the form of a quest. Her personal wounds sparkle in ellipses throughout her investigation, but space is especially given to the gaping wounds of the three women of the title, three Hollywood stars of the same maternal lineage: Tippi Hedren, her daughter Melanie Griffith and her granddaughter Dakota Johnson. — M.L.

Ed. Babel, €7.90.

“American Mother”, de Colum McCann avec Diane Foley

In 2020, Colum McCann delivered with Apeirogon a masterful work, vibrant with humanity, fragments of the crossed story of two fathers, one Israeli Jew, the other Palestinian, each in mourning for his daughter. Haunted by Middle Eastern violence, McCann never strayed far from it, settling in Rochester, New England, with Diane Foley, “American mother” whose son Jim, a journalist, was detained and then beheaded in Syria by an Islamist terrorist in 2014. — V.R.

Ed. 10/18, €8.30.

“Manhattan Project”, by Stefano Massini

With Stefano Massini, everything always starts with a suitcase, here placed on an emigrant disembarkation platform in Manhattan. We remember the suitcase of the Lehman Brothers, to which the Italian writer dedicated a saga (The Lehman Brothers), which preceded this one, centered on a group of brilliant young physicists, all Hungarians, all Jews, fleeing in 1938 “the Europe of the dauber”. Always using short free verses, full of storms, incantations, fury and devastating humor (Mazel Tov !), the author leads his small band of exiles, who are about to write the history of American nuclear physics, to a banker responsible for convincing Roosevelt to buy his entire stock of uranium in the Congo. — V.R.

Ed. Satellites – Christian Bourgois, €11.30.