Philippe Besson, Vanessa Springora, Frédéric Beigbeder, Leila Slimani, Pierre Lemaitre: the novels for winter 2025 recommended by CL

Let’s start with Besson. The new work of the faithful and prolix Barbezilian author (which will be signed at the Cosmopolite bookstore in Angoulême on January 25) is entitled “Tell you about my son” (Julliard). And as the title indicates, we hear a father in dialogue with himself during the white march led by hundreds of strangers who came to honor the memory of Hugo, 14 years old. The father wonders. Is he guilty of the tragic fate inflicted on his son? The lines are then an indictment against ordinary violence, stupidity and intolerance. Besson finds all his power and commitment there. It has been in bookstores since January 2 like that of Vanessa Springora. Indeed, five years after “Le Consentement”, “Patronyme” is a new investigation (Grasset). This time it’s her Czech grandfather, Joseph Springora, whom she loved and admired. Except, when her own father died, Vanessa found two old photos in the family home in which the said Joseph, who was not yet called Springora, displayed Nazi insignia! The legend is immediately shattered. A book that combines story, archives and some forays into fiction.

The same process, basically, as Frédéric Beigbeder with “A Single Man” (Grasset, in bookstores January 8). He builds a bio fiction around Jean-Michel, his father who died in 2023. Frédéric, now calmer and a happy father, raises a tomb for this brilliant and absent man whom he never really knew. He makes him a character of the 20th^e century. A true capitalist and opportunistic boomer – was he a CIA agent as the son imagines? – whose ideology was luxury and comfort and frenzied seduction, a way of life. A man whom a sacrificed childhood has transformed into a selfish pleasure-seeker and whose destiny is to end up solitary. In short, a sincere, moving and funny Beigbeder as we like him.

And then also rush into two highly anticipated sequels: first “A Radiant Future” (Calmann Levy, in bookstores January 21), the third volume of Pierre Lemaitre’s trilogy on the Trente Glorieuses. We devoured it. As exciting as “The Big World” and “The Silence and the Anger”. And always the adventures and adventures of the Pelletier family in the 60s and their troubles beyond the Iron Curtain. Then “I will carry the fire” with which Leila Slimani closes her trilogy on Morocco (Gallimard). We find Mathilde and Amine in a postcolonial country which is following its path towards modernity. Flaming and flamboyant.