Stupor
Zeruya Shalev
An essential figure in the Israeli literary scene, Zeruya Shalev (What’s left of our lives, foreign Femina prize in 2014) often brilliantly combines individual stories and collective destinies. In Stupor, a woman at her dying and confused father’s bedside discovers the existence of his mysterious first wife. By finding his trail, she will also unearth a painful past in the clandestine armed struggle, before the founding of the State of Israel. Their meeting will unexpectedly change their lives and will forever link their destinies. The writer “questions parenthood, the couple, but also the guilt and the silences that govern our lives”.
Gallimard, September 28
Eden
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
In Edenthe new novel by the Icelandic writer Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, a specialist in endangered languages, always traveling from one conference to another around the world, calculates her carbon footprint and realizes that she needs to plant 5,600 trees to compensate for the pollution for which she is responsible. After buying a small house with land “of rock, sand and lava”, she plans to grow a colony of birch trees there. With a little botany, as in Rosa Candida (Zulma, 2010), this new novel is presented to us as an ode to humanity and the “infinite power of words”.
Zulma, October 18
The morning star
Karl Ove Knausgaard
After the six volumes of his monumental autobiography (My battleDenoël, 2012 to 2020), the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard returns to fiction with The morning star, his third novel, the first to be translated into French. Set in a small seaside resort in southern Norway, the novel’s nine narrators all seem to be at a crossroads in their lives. In the morning, a huge star seems to come dangerously close to the Earth’s surface, while other strange phenomena arise in the lives of the characters. A big choral novel “with a twilight and melancholy atmosphere”.
Denoël, September 20
Copper beech
Kim from Horizon
Winner of the prestigious German Book Prize and Swiss Book Prize with Copper beech, Kim from Horizon In this first novel, he combines a story of training in the 21st century with an exploration of the secrets of his maternal lineage, while his grandmother begins to lose her memory. While recounting his discovery of his “witch” ancestry, the book also tells how a child assigned male at birth “refuses to be locked into a gender identity and claims his fluidity”.
Julliard, October 6
Convoy to Samarkand
Gouzel Iakhina
In the 1920s, as famine raged in the Volga region, the Soviet government organized evacuation convoys to save children. In one of these trains, the Red Army officer Deyev is in charge of 500 children, whom he must transport from Kazan to Samarkand. The Russian writer Gouzel Iakhina (Children of the Volga) continues with Convoy to Samarkand his sensitive exploration of the history of the USSR. While facing the ghosts of his past and the crimes he committed in the name of Soviet power, the protagonist of his third novel shows a possible path to redemption.
Black on White, October 4
Chronicles of the country of the happiest people in the world
Wole Soyinka
In an imaginary Nigeria, a cunning entrepreneur sells, for ritual practices, organs that were stolen from the hospital where Doctor Menka, a surgeon who repairs victims of Boko Haram, works. The latter will tell his oldest friend, an eminent Yoruba engineer who is about to take a prestigious position at the United Nations. With Chronicles of the country of the happiest people in the worldthe Nobel-winning Nigerian novelist, poet and playwright Wole Soyinkaborn in 1934, returns in force with this humanist political satire with an obviously ironic title, which is also intended to be a tribute to Nigerians.
Threshold, October 13
Misericordia
Lydia Jorge
An old lady records her last days in a retirement home and offers us “a summary of vital force, derision, revolt, attention to others and faith in life”. This thirteenth novel by Lydia Jorge, Misericordiais, according to its publisher, one of the most daring books in current Portuguese literature as well as an admirable testimony to the human condition.
Métailié, September 29
Tasmania
Paolo Giordano
The narrator of Tasmaniathe new novel by Paolo Giordano (The solitude of prime numbers), a science journalist who came to Paris to cover the 2015 climate summit is caught in a whirlwind of intimate and collective upheavals – the Paris attacks, a crisis in his relationship. To administer an electroshock and give new meaning to his little universe, he will surround himself with a few atypical characters: a young adventurous physicist, a cloud specialist, a colorful reporter and a priest who met the wife of his life.
The noise of the world, September 20
The city of victory
Salman Rushdie
Completed before the Islamist knife attack which Salman Rushdie was a victim on August 12, 2022 — after which he lost an eye and the use of a hand —, The city of victory is a feminist and fanciful saga set in 14th century Indiae century. A story presented as being the fictional translation of an Indian epic of twenty-four thousand verses discovered in a clay jar. Its author, the princess-poet Pampa Kampana, had the particularity of never aging and recounts the birth and decline of the city that she created from nothing.
Actes Sud, in bookstores
Impossible goodbyes
Han Kang
A friend who was urgently hospitalized on the mainland asks Gyeongha to take a plane to the Korean island of Jeju to save the white parrot that she had to leave all alone there. Gyeongha will find her friend’s house filled to bursting with archives gathered to document one of the worst massacres Korea has known: 30,000 civilians murdered in 1948 and 1949 because they were communists. With Impossible goodbyesa hymn to friendship and praise of the imagination, the Korean Han Kang (winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize International in 2016 for The vegetarian) explores with power and skill the sometimes painful past of his country.
Grasset, October 11