BristolJean Echenoz
Extravagant leaks, shaky threads and telescoped biographies are the hallmark of Jean Echenoz. And for his 18the novel, the author of I’m leaving (Minuit, 1999, Prix Goncourt) does not deviate from it. The protagonist of BristolRobert Bristol, is a film director with checkered success, who did not see a body falling from the fifth floor when he left his Parisian building. Preoccupied with the adaptation of a novel by Marjorie des Marais, “the woman with three hundred bestsellers”, he will travel for several months between Paris, Brittany and Botswana. Echenoz diverts with humor, as usual, and in an extravagant style, the codes of biography, adventure novel and detective novel.
Midnight, February 12
SurnameVanessa Springora
« What’s in a name ? » asked Juliet in a Shakespeare play. This is the question that Vanessa Springora tries to answer in Surnamehis second book after Consent (Grasset, 2020), a resounding success in which she recounted her relationship with the writer Gabriel Matzneff when she was a teenager. After the death of his father, who died at the time of the release of Consentshe will make a certain number of disturbing discoveries in her father’s unsanitary apartment. Above all about her last name, about which she knew almost nothing, she writes in this investigative story, other than “the successive fables” forged by her father “over the course of a sporadic relationship”.
Grasset, February 26
A bright futurePierre Lemaitre
Winner of the Goncourt Prize in 2013 for Goodbye up there (one million copies sold, translations into 42 languages, a film adaptation), Pierre Lemaitre will be back with the third part of his tetralogy The glorious yearswhose plot unfolds around a family of French industrialists who owned a soap factory in Beirut. In “A Radiant Future”, after “The Big World” and “The Silence and the Anger”, one of the Pelletier sons, who became a journalist in Paris, will be involved somewhat unwillingly in Prague, in Czechoslovakia, in a story of espionage that nods to John Le Carré. A thrilling family saga set against a backdrop of economic growth and social progress in post-war France.
Calmann-Lévy, February 12
I will take away the fireLeila Slimani
With I will take away the firethe third and final part of his trilogy The country of othersthe Franco-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani continues to draw inspiration from her own family history. After “The war, the war, the war” (2020) and “Watch us dance” (2022), which took us through the decades 1940-1960, this time she imagines the destinies of the third generation of the Belhaj family, Mia and Inès, and tells us about the years 1980-1990 lived on each side of the Mediterranean, between Morocco and France, addressing the issues of immigration, exile, racism.
Gallimard, March 5
Prisoner of the Scarlet DreamAndrei Makine
The one often presented as the most French of Russian writers, Andreï Makine, will tell us in his 21e delivers half a century of history of the Soviet Union and France through the intense human adventure of Lucien Baert, a young French communist “prisoner of the scarlet dream”. Landing in the USSR in 1939, the protagonist of Prisoner of the Scarlet Dream will experience, before attempting a return to France thirty years later, the behind the scenes: the cruelty of the regime and the Gulag camps. A novel about Stalinist barbarism and the rejection of Western hypocrisy.
Grasset, February 26
All the lives of ThéoNathalie Azoulai
-In Tall the lives of ThéoNathalie Azoulai, once again exploring French Jewishness with finesse, tells the story of an intimate and political divide. Raised with the guilt of the Holocaust, Théo meets Léa in his mid-20s at a shooting gallery. She is of Jewish origin, he is Breton, they will love each other because of and despite their differences. But twenty-five years later, their relationship will be called into question by the French political situation, the rise of anti-Semitism, the October 7 attack in Israel and all the deaths in Gaza.
POL, February 12
The RealityNeige Sinno
The author of sad tiger (POL, 2023, Prix Femina, Prix des libraires du Québec), will return to us with a novel. In The RealityNeige Sinno, who has lived in Mexico for many years, recounts the trip made to this country around twenty years ago by two young women, Netcha, the narrator, and Maga, a Spanish friend. An initiatory journey that will lead them in the footsteps of Subcomandante Marcos, in search of a village in Chiapas called La Realidad where the leader of the Zapatista movement is said to have lived. A sensitive exploration of revolutionary ideas, where we notably address colonization and the relationship between ideals and reality, while the trembling ghost of Antonin Artaud floats.
POL, April 16
A man aloneFrédéric Beigbeder
Inspired by the death of his father in 2023, Frédéric Beigbeder also tackles the question of the father with A man alonea book halfway between homage and settling of scores. His terrible years in a Catholic boarding school in Sorèze where, he writes, “corporal punishments were daily and pedophilia tolerated in silence”. The rich hours of recruitment advisor (headhunter) serving large multinationals and playboy high roller who may have been in the service of the CIA. His sad record as an absent father after the divorce. His last years in businessman misanthrope” sick and ruined. The author of Love lasts three years andA French novel (1997 and 2009), who would never have dared to write this book during his father’s lifetime, he admits, tries to put together the pieces of a puzzle.
Grasset, March 5
A magnificent loserFlorence Seyvo
With a mixture of fascination and pity, the narrator ofA magnificent loser by Florence Seyvo remembers her father-in-law who worked in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, convinced he could make his fortune there. A man with a complex personality, sometimes caring, sometimes tyrannical, always living in excess and a phobia of routine, he had for a time convinced Irene and Anna’s mother to settle there with him at the beginning of the 1980s, before they returned to Le Havre, France, while he was content to come and see them twice a year. A beautiful portrait which highlights the ambiguity of the character, both noble and ridiculous.
From the Olivier, in March
Your promiseCamille Laurens
In Your promiselike a thriller, Camille Laurens dissects a four-year toxic relationship experienced by a novelist, Claire Lancel, with a narcissistic pervert for whom she had left everything. Until the last straw, when the man wanted to make him promise never to write about him. Examining, among other things, the relationship between writing and life, the narrator tells how she gradually allowed herself to be drawn into a love story made up of manipulation and lies. Camille Laurens examines, according to her editor, “contemporary narcissism, the absence of empathy, and wonders how to save love from its illusions”.
Gallimard, February 12
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