Day of surf
Maylis of Kerangal
Twenty years after leaving Le Havre, a woman receives a call from the police after the discovery of a body on a beach in the town where she grew up. Day of surf, of Maylis of Kerangal (Birth of bridges, Repairing the living), is populated by ghosts, starting with that of this city, almost completely destroyed by Allied bombings during the Second World War. With her intense and meandering writing under the influence of Virginia Woolf, with whom she exhumes layers of memory under the skin, Maylis de Kerangal offers one of the flagship books of this new season.
Verticals, in bookstores
Madelaine before dawn
Sandrine Collette
One day, a hungry red-haired girl comes out of the forest like a wild animal and will turn the lives of the inhabitants of the hamlet of Montées upside down, a region cut off from the world, where the climate is harsh and the peasants are enslaved to a caste of local lords. The author of We were wolves (2022), Sandrine Collette compose with Madelaine before dawnhis 11e title, a rural drama with deep and sensory ramifications, which draws on animality, the survival instinct and family ties.
JC Lattès, in bookstores
The pretty evil
Emma Becker
Is it possible to combine passionate love, motherhood and writing? Emma Becker (The housen), a heavyweight in women’s autofiction, attempts to answer this question in The pretty evil. The writer, married and mother of two children, tells in three seasons her adulterous love story full of obstacles with a “right-wing anarchist” writer from the French aristocracy. A kind of romantic thriller with keys, which reminds us “that there are dramas in this human existence that walk around disguised as miracles”. On the menu: emotions, flirtation, raw eroticism and voluntary subjugation.
Albin Michel, in bookstores
Hut
Abel Quentin
Loosely based on the 1972 Meadows Report, in which scientists warned humanity of the ecological consequences of unlimited economic growth, Abel Quentin (Sister, The seer of Étampes) takes us from Puy-de-Dôme to Berkeley, via Norway. He imagines in Hutwith a touch of satire as usual, the trajectory of four whistleblowers who will grapple, from 1972 to today, with the consequences of this visionary report, but also with their own conscience.
The Observatory, in bookstores
Jacaranda
Gael Faye
Eight years after the immense success of Small countrya partly autobiographical novel, the French-Rwandan singer-songwriter and rapper Gael Faye delves into the wounded memory of Rwanda. Its 2e novel, Jacaranda, unfolds through the eyes of a teenager, the son of a Rwandan woman exiled in France, who discovers from abroad the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 — one million dead in three months. Exploring the silences and the weight of pain, the writer paints a broad picture of Rwanda, from the pre-colonial era to the present day.
Grasset, in bookstores
Casualness is a beautiful thing.
Philippe Jaenada
Obsessed with the figure of Jacqueline Harispe, known as Kaki, encountered as a character in a novel by Patrick Modiano (In the cafe of lost youth2007), Philippe Jaenada devotes one of his investigative novels – in which he focuses on “lives that change” – to this young woman, a runaway and of great beauty, who committed suicide at the age of twenty in 1953. Casualness is a beautiful thing. brings back to life a group of young pre-punks who met at Chez Moineau, a small Parisian bar of the time. From Dunkirk to Menton, from Debord to Patrick Straram, a fascinating road trip melancholic through the France of today and yesterday, from one bar to another.
Mialet-Barrault, in bookstores
The Bastion of Tears
Abdellah Taia
Youssef, a Moroccan professor exiled in France, returns to Salé, the city of his childhood on the Atlantic coast, after twenty-five years abroad, on the occasion of his mother’s death. A journey that allows him to revisit his past, the discovery of his homosexuality in Morocco in the 1980s, as well as all the social and family violence. In The Bastion of Tears, Abdellah Taia (An Arab melancholy, Unfaithful) sends a literary double to retrace his origins, a character who finds there through the fate of his many sisters who remained behind, women subject to their husbands and their fixed conception of traditions.
Julliard, October 4
Houris
Kamel Daoud
The Algerian novelist and journalist Kamel Daoud (Meursault, counter-investigation2014) returns with a third novel, Houris. A book that presents itself as the terrible and hallucinatory monologue of a mute and mutilated survivor of the Had Chekala massacre – which left 1000 dead – perpetrated by Islamists during the terrible Algerian “black decade” between 1992 and 2002. Kamel Daoud especially gives voice to the women, eternal victims, and seeks to free a still painful memory that the Algerian authorities are relentlessly trying to erase.
Gallimard, in bookstores
Account of some facts
Yasmina Reza
In Account of some factsthe playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza (Art, Babylon) elevates the news story to the rank of art, relating in her own way, as if on a thread, various criminal trials, sometimes sensational, that she has attended in recent years — femicide, poisoning, rape, corruption. She punctuates these uncompromising accounts with personal memories and dense snapshots, where Venice and the specter of death play the leading role. Fifty-four texts linked together, in a way that is as strong as it is strange, by an incisive language.
Flammarion, October 10
The life of ghosts
Patrice Jean
“Has there been a single human being since the Quaternary era who has measured, in all his truth, the degree of indifference to which he was universally the object?” This is what the hero of The life of ghoststhe latest novel by Patrice Jean. We will find there the author of The extra man (2017) more Flaubertian than ever, grating and merciless, in this novel where a journalist in decline finds refuge with the ghosts of his past. A dark or lucid reading – depending – of the spirit of the times that is ours.
Le Cherche Midi, October 4