In Mission Damas by David McCloskey published by Editions du Seuilthe author uses his knowledge of the CIA and imagines a spy story that sheds light on what the Syrian regime of Bashar El-Assad was like. It is the first novel by this former CIA analyst which tells us a lot about what this attempted Syrian revolution was, and especially the absolutely ruthless repression of the regime of Bashar El-Assad.
Winter Warriors by Olivier Norek at Michel Lafon
Logically, the winter warriors are the men who fought the winter war. This Russo-Finnish war started by the Russians and Stalin, in November 1939. Olivier Norek, who closely follows a Finnish soldier, a poor peasant, but a sniper who will be nicknamed “the white death”. The malice, the knowledge of the terrain, the skill, the heroism of the Finnish soldiers will work miracles. Opposite, the political stupidity, the rigidity, the heaviness of the Red Army which will still end up winning and amputating Finland of part of its territory. A conflict which, inevitably, recalls today's war between Putin's Russia and Ukraine.
The Italian by Arturo Pérez-Reverte at Gallimard
It's a war novel. Arturo Pérez-Reverte unearths the history of the Mayans, these torpedoes on which divers from the Italian navy sat, to come and sabotage the English navy in Mediterranean ports. In this case, in this novel, it is an identified group, acting from Algeciras towards the port of Gibraltar, on the other side of the Bay.
But it is also a romance novel. Pérez-Reverte tells us how an extraordinary love story was born from this episode. It is also a novel of maritime adventures, a novel about heroism, about commitment. And also an introspective novel about how a writer treats and documents a subject.
The sleeping beast of Don Tracy in the black series by Gallimard
This novel is chilling. It is the story of a lynching in 24 hours, the description of a collective madness, of rare violence, which flourished in the segregationist America of the 1930s. DonTracy offers us the meticulous account of the lynching of a young black man in a small port in Maryland.
Waiting for the flood of Dolores Redondo in the black series by Gallimard
Waiting for the flood could be the story of the terrible floods that hit Bilbao in August 1983. The Basque writer describes herself as a writer of storms.
Waiting for the flood also inspired by a news item: three murders of young women in Glasgow, Scotland, between 1968 and 1969. In the novel, Dolores Redondo imagines a cop obsessed with this case on the verge of arresting the serial killer 15 years later late, in torrential rain, when he is struck down by a heart attack.
Barely recovered, his health on hold, but listening to his intuition, and resisting the injunctions of his superiors, he follows the murderer's trail to Bilbao. That's not in reality. This is the fiction of Dolores Redondo. And the novel is rich, dense, with once again a truly very unique atmosphere.
