Intermezzo
Sally Rooney
After Conversations between friends And Normal People (L’Olivier, 2019 and 2021), the young Irish writer Sally Rooney continues in the same vein. With Intermezzoshe will tell us the story of two brothers who have been separated by the years and who will find each other again when their father dies. An ultra-sensitive and solitary chess player, Ivan, twenty-two, will get closer to Peter, a renowned Dublin lawyer in his thirties. With her fine touch, the writer immerses us in the mourning and sometimes complex loves of these two opposing beings, exploring in this interlude the meanders of family, heart and soul.
Gallimard, September 24
Toxic season for fetuses
Vera Bogdanova
Released in 2022 in Russia, Toxic season for fetusesof Vera Bogdanovaa novelist and translator born in Moscow in 1986, presents herself as an unvarnished portrait of an era, plunging us into the intimacy of an ordinary Russian family in the 1990s, through economic difficulties and widespread violence — also ordinary. A novel with multiple shades of dark, in which the author represents, like seismic waves, the social repercussions of the collapse of the USSR. A very dark novel that has become, it seems, the reference for generation Y in Russia.
Actes Sud, October 10
Theodoros
Mircea Cartarescu
Change of direction for the Romanian Mircea Cartarescu (Solenoid), who returns with Theodorosa fresco full of adventures and twists set in the 19th centurye century, in which he traces the fate, fall and rise of Teodor, the son of servants of a minor Romanian aristocrat who dreams of being emperor and will stop at nothing to satisfy his quest for power. He will become for a time the improbable Tewodros II, sovereign of Ethiopia, and will die in 1868 fighting the soldiers of Queen Victoria. Between the historical novel and pure invention.
Black on White, October 2
The Polish
JM Coetzee
With The Polishthe South African writer who won the Nobel Prize in 2003 J. M Coetzee (Disgrace, Michael K, his life, his times) returns with a short novel, in which a 72-year-old Polish pianist, a Chopin specialist invited for a recital at the Sala Mompou in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, falls head over heels in love with the younger wife of a banker. The old man will plunge into a one-sided passion, where the language of love and foreign idioms, it is said, intertwine under Coetzee’s slightly ironic gaze to create, despite the interpreters, confusion and a bit of nonsense.
Threshold, October 19
The Copenhagen Trilogy, Vol. 3 — Addiction
Tove Ditlevsen
Third and final part of the autobiographical trilogy of the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen (1917-1976), DependenceAfter Childhood And Youthaddresses her years of struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction. A recognized poet, she recounts her literary ambitions, unhappy marriages and unwanted pregnancies, as well as the beginning of writing her memoirs, at the dawn of her fifties, during a long stay in a psychiatric hospital in the late 1960s. A pioneer of feminine self-writing, who is being rediscovered today.
Globe, November 24
The Cold Crematorium. In the Land of Auschwitz
József Debreczeni
If concentration camp literature has its sad masterpieces – made up of the memories of Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, Jorge Semprun or Robert Antelme – it is in this burning vein that The Cold Crematoriumof József Debreczeni. An unpublished story in French, a twelve-month journey of horror through what the Hungarian survivor calls “the country of Auschwitz”, to the final camp of Dörnhau, this “cold crematorium” with the appearance of a hospital where the Nazis sent exhausted prisoners.
Stock, October 14
The wonders
Viola Ardone
Elba, named after an Italian river, grew up with her mother in a place she calls the “half-world”: a psychiatric asylum in Naples. Until the day a doctor decides to release the patients, as provided for by a law passed a few years earlier in 1978, and to take the little girl under his protection. In The wonderswith humor and sensitivity, the Italian novelist Viola Ardone (The children’s train) continues its exploration of some of the light and dark pages of 20th century Italye century.
Albin Michel, in bookstores
The flickering light
Nino Haratischwili
From a traumatic incident in the courtyard of a Tbilisi apartment building in 1987 to Brussels in 2019, The flickering lightby the German novelist and playwright of Georgian origin Nino Haratischwili (The Eighth Life), is a human fresco that spans more than thirty years. It follows the individual trajectories of four friends, Dina, Keto, Nene and Ira, who grew up together. Faced with violence — from men, from their country, from a Soviet system that is cracking everywhere —, driven by their passions and their ideals, they will each come up against the realities of history in their own way.
Gallimard, in bookstores
The Last Dream
Pedro Almodovar
With The Last Dreamthe Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar will offer us a collection of stories, composed between 1967 and 2023, which at times give us the impression of having come straight out of one of his films. A story of a transvestite who confronts a priest who traumatized him, a necrophiliac variation on the theme of Sleeping Beautyfleeing mothers, a lot of dark fantasy. Alongside more personal texts in which he evokes the artist’s solitude, his anxiety or his complex relationship with literature. A window open onto the complex and colorful universe of this giant of cinema.
Flammarion, October 3
In the evening of Alexandria
Alaa El Aswani
The Egyptian Alaa El Aswanithe author of The Yacoubian Building (2006), whose work is now banned in his own country, will return to us with In the evening of Alexandriahis fifth novel, to give us, from his exile in Chicago, a portrait of a bygone era. In Alexandria, a large cosmopolitan city in Egypt at the end of the 1950s, a group of friends regularly meet in the bar of a restaurant on the Corniche for long evenings to remake the world. Each will be confronted with their ideals of justice and beauty in the face of the rise to power and hardening of the Nasser regime.
Actes Sud, October 10