discover our favorites among the selections

► « Ann of England »

Selected for the Femina Prize and the Medici Prize

Victim of a stroke, the author’s mother spent several hours lying on the tiles of her kitchen. “We think about it or we don’t think about it. I’ve been thinking about it for thirty years. I’m trying to prepare for it.”confesses Julia Deck, at her mother’s bedside. Doctors are pessimistic. But Ann of England, royal, resists. This in-between at the end of life revives the past. It’s time for the last confidences, secrets revealed perhaps, and a life assembled in a few carved pages. To recount the years of a young girl born in England, adult in France, is to remember while seeking support to live on. The past emerges, revealing the twists and turns of destiny: “The course of life is a series of accidents that did not happen. »

» READ THE REVIEW : “Ann of England” by Julia Deck: everything (or almost) about her mother

► “Among other solitudes”

Selected for the Interallié prize

It is the story of a lonely, single man, without children, who loses his father. And who, while sorting things before emptying the house, comes across a file containing short portraits of people as lonely as himself. Presented like this, Yves Harté’s book does not make you dream. And yet… Among other solitudes is a superb and strong gallery of characters, whose lives are both tiny and essential. The author, former journalist at South Westtells us about his father, his land, this nature, “who gives a lot as long as we pay attention to him”. Adage that also applies to people.

► « You are the Führer’s unhappy love »

Selected for the Goncourt price and the Renaudot prize

The man of power and the architect have always had a fascination for each other. Here, we are talking about Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer, who designed grandiose projects for the dictator before becoming his minister of armaments. With the freedom of the novelist, Jean-Noël Orengo explores this Faustian pact which Speer will survive. At the Nuremberg trials, he managed to convince the judges of his ignorance of the extermination of the Jews and ended his days as a successful memoirist. Dizzying question: how could we believe it?

► “Clean”

Selected for the foreign Femina prize and the foreign Medici prize

She abuses us, Estela, with her habit of calling us witnesses like judges. Thanks to the formidable pen of Alia Trabucco Zeran, we hear her shout her right, this “domestic worker” who arrived in the Chilean capital to watch over the only daughter of a bourgeois couple. We see her, frumpy, scrubbing, washing, ironing with her rough hands like her mother, then locking herself in “the back room” – his room. We are humiliated with Estela and yet she worries us. Right away, she told us: “The little girl dies. » Did she kill her? Stuck us in an uncertain face-to-face encounter with a heroine who slips away, Alia Trabucco makes us happy captives of her story.