Love Towles— bestselling author A gentleman in Moscow (2016) — deploys his immense talent as a storyteller throughout the unpredictable lincoln highway (Fayard, in bookstores), mythical road crossing the United States from east to west, in a new choral novel. Emmett and Billy Watson, two orphans, are forced to start their lives anew. Their plan to reach California is disrupted when two convicts on the run steal their car and their meager savings. Then follows an incredible pursuit through the country of Uncle Sam, populated by colorful characters – vagabonds, comic vaudevilliers and aristocrats – and misadventures that lead to self-discovery. Entertaining as hell. Translated from English by Nathalie Cunnington.
Miranda, a college drama teacher, is devastated by chronic pain, a near-breaking couple, her students’ lack of confidence, and an addiction to drugs. While everything seems to be slipping through her fingers, she meets three strange benefactors, who promise her success and visibility, in work as in pain. A clever mix of comedy and horror, All is well (Québec Amérique, September 27) denounces our collective refusal to listen to women and recognize their suffering. A subversive and “ruthlessly funny” account of Mona Awad (Rabbit). Translated from English by Marie Frankland.
A novel that celebrates the power of writing and imagination? Not very original, one might think. This is before boarding The city of clouds and birds (Albin Michel, September 14), an exhilarating and inventive journey through the world and time. From Constantinople to America in the 1950s, from modern times to a distant future where humanity is playing its survival aboard a spaceship, the American writer Anthony Doerr creates unforgettable characters, whose destinies are linked by a mysterious text from ancient Greece. An immersive and fascinating novel that erases, for a divine moment, the contours of reality. Translated from English by Marina Boraso.
Heather O’Neill’s Feminist Revolution
Ten years after the unforgettable Some had never seen the sea (2012), winner of the Femina Foreign Award, American writer Julie Otsuka is back with The swimming line (Gallimard, October), a novel imbued with poetry and sweetness, which features Alice, an old lady whose memory is beginning to fail, and her community of swimmers. When cracks appear in the bottom of the pool where they meet weekly, forcing the establishment to close, Alice sinks. Placed in a retirement home, she only exists through the memories evoked by her daughter. In this space where death is as concrete as it is unimaginable, Julie Otsuka captures the chasms, dizziness and bursts of lucidity that persist and recreates in a grand metaphor the sensation of loss of meaning and control where only the moment remains. here. Translated from English by Carine Chichereau.
America’s story
Jonathan Franzen — true to his own way — makes the family nucleus the microcosm of American society, of its excesses and its great discrepancies in Crossroads (de l’Olivier, November), a colossal new choral novel. In this first volume of what is announced as a trilogy that will span three generations, the family of a pastor must deal with a rival who has just arrived in the parish. With patience and erudition, the writer deposits the intimacy of his characters in the heart of America in the 1970s upset by the imminent arrival of the Vietnam War and by the emancipation of a generation. Less gritty than his previous novels, Franzen also questions the meaning and capricious quest for kindness. Powerful. Translated from English by Olivier Deparis.
Everyone knows Johannes Kepler, the mathematician and astronomer who gave his name to the laws of planetary motion. However, few know that her mother, Katharina, an illiterate old widow with healing skills, was accused of witchcraft and forced to fight to bring out the truth. Canadian-American writer Rivka Galchen draws on historical accounts to offer a romantic novel, both archaic and modern satire that demonstrates that the irrational fears, collective violence and misogyny that led to the Inquisition are far from being a thing of the past. your mother is a witch (Boreal, October 4). Translated from English by Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné.
Probe the violence
For more than twenty years, Juan Gabriel Vasquez probes the violent past of Colombia and dissects there a human experience inseparable from this great collective suffering. Her new novel, A retrospective (Threshold, October), is no exception. Through the past of Sergio Cabrera, a Colombian director whose father has just died, the writer recounts – between the Cultural Revolution in China and that led by the Colombian guerrillas – the breathless and touching story of a family subjected to the forces Of the history. The intimate skillfully gives way here to politics, in a great reflection on the weight of inheritance and free will. Translated from Spanish by Isabelle Gugnon.
“Behind the wheel of a car without headlights, the night is a warm mouth in which we sing,” writes Billy Ray Belcourt in NDN Mechanisms [diminutif de Native Indian] adaptation (Triptych, September 13). Originally from the Cree Nation of Driftpile, British Columbia, he explores, in a heterogeneous narrative that combines the codes of novels, poetry, essays and photography, the violence, anger and suffering that drags Canadian colonial history in its wake. With overwhelming lucidity, he addresses the limits of poetry as a tool for liberation and questions his own identity as a writer through the political demands of queerness and the dominant representations of Aboriginal reality. “A necessary shock”, which urges us to avoid, in our openness to others, the pitfalls of categorization and binarity. Translated from English by Natasha Kanapé Fontaine.