Making a woman
Marie Darrieussecq
Marie Darrieussecq returns to us with Making a womana new novel which takes the form of an assessment, his twentieth book since Truisms, released in 1996. We will find Rose and Solange, childhood friends, neighbors and classmates. Characters already known to Darrieussecq’s readers, Rose having been the heroine of The sea upside down (2019), while we got to know Solange in Cleves (2011) and You have to love men a lot (2013). After the transformation of the female body and the discovery of sexuality recounted in Clevesthis time we witness, in the heart of the 1990s, the entry into adulthood of these two young women whose destinies are presented to us alternately.
POL, February 21
Living in the fire
Antoine Volodine
In a no-man’s land with blurred borders, a few seconds before being burned by the flames of a napalm cloud, a soldier urgently begins to invent a biography and tell himself stories. Living in the firetwenty-second and last signed book Antoine Volodine — the main pseudonym of Jean Desvignes, who also signs books under the names of Lutz Bassmann, Manuela Draeger or Elli Kronauer — will close a long chapter of an original and monumental work. In a genre that the author himself described as “post-exoticism”, mixing science fiction, shamanism, fantastic folklore and the excess of 20th century history.e century, Volodine treats herself to a “final spark of agony”.
Threshold, February
Who lives
Valerie Zenatti
Novelist, screenwriter and translator (notably of Aharon Appelfeld) who spent her adolescence in Israel, in the Negev desert, Valerie Zenatti will tell us about a wandering of yesterday and today between Tel Aviv, Capernaum and Jerusalem. Who lives, her seventh novel for adults, will immerse the reader in the inner tumult of a Parisian who leaves on a whim for Israel in the footsteps of the famous concert given by Leonard Cohen in 1974 in Jerusalem. In search of answers to the questions she has been asking for a long time, through encounters with strangers and a few ghosts, this woman in search of humanity will face the tragic and age-old reality of war in this region of the world. .
The Olivier, February
Live. Countdown
Boualem Sansal
In Paris or in the depths of Missouri, humans have been chosen by a mysterious extraterrestrial power to receive and broadcast a simple and terrifying message: in 780 days the presence of men on Earth will end. The “Called” will have to choose trustworthy men and women who will be able to participate, far from Earth, in the founding of a new humanity. Before getting there, they will have to determine together how to exclude from the selection men and women who have demonstrated their harmfulness: the powerful, the politicians, the mafiosi and the religious of all persuasions. This is the bold proposal with which the Algerian will return to us Boualem Sansal with Live. Countdown.
Gallimard, February 21
Nomadic identity
JMG Le Clézio
The writer JMG Le Cléziowinner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008, tells his story in Nomadic identity, where he focuses in particular, as the title indicates, on nomadism, which has shaped his vision of the world since childhood. Born in Nice in 1940 during the difficult years of the Second World War, it was in Africa, in Nigeria, where he had gone to join his father, he says, that he discovered “the freedom and happiness of existence”. Born from a conference entitled What can literature do in the face of world disruption?delivered at the Marrakech African Book Festival in February 2023, the book is intended to be an ode to the power of literature.
Robert Laffont, February 23
Fantastic love story
Sophie Divry
In Lyon, a labor inspector must investigate the death of a worker at a waste treatment plant crushed in a compactor. At the same time, a science journalist visits a nuclear research center in Geneva to write an article on the scintillator crystal, a new material whose properties disconcert its inventors. With Fantastic love storyhis ninth book, Sophie Divry (The suburban condition), continuing its fine exploration of our contemporary societies, electrifies an unexpected meeting between a man and a woman.
Threshold, February
The witness
Joy Sorman
In The witness, Joy Sorman imagine that a man enters the Paris courthouse and decides to settle there clandestinely. Hidden at night in a ceiling, he walks around the courtrooms during the day to witness the spectacle of justice (or injustice), in a ballet of lawyers and magistrates often busy judging “a class to which no one of them will never belong.” A bit like she did in To the madness (2021), where she looked at the reality of psychiatry in France, the writer resorted to the novel after having herself followed the courthouse hearings for a year, once a week. A political text as much as an immersion in the sometimes rusty workings of French justice.
Flammarion, February 15
The Capitol Hyena
Simon Liberati
With The Capitol Hyena, Simon Liberati will take us into a somewhat twilight Rome, stuck between the end of the dolce vita and the beginning of another, “more electric” era. Taïné and Alexis Tcherepakine, sister and brother, will meet a particularly poisonous woman there, Dominique Mihrage, aptly nicknamed “the hyena of the Capitol”. This woman, “the greatest bad luck charm of the 1970s”, who appeared during a dinner in Rome one autumn evening, will clash with the trajectory of the talented photographer and the weak-willed writer. Liberati continues with this new novel a sequel tinged with dark romanticism begun with The demons (Stock, 2020), “saga of an extravagant and tormented siblings from the 1960s to the 1980s”.
Stock, February 28
With the fairies
Sylvain Tesson
“They existed when we worked to make them appear. ” Who is that ? Much more than tiny women who look like dragonflies, fairies are more of a way of looking at landscapes, we are told. Sylvain Tesson, “a quality of reality revealed by a disposition of the gaze”. With two friends aboard a fifteen-meter sailboat, from Spanish Galicia to the Scottish Shetlands, passing through the coasts of Brittany and those of Ireland, the travel writer traveled for three months along an “arc Celtic”. With his usual verve, he tells us the story, in With the fairies, of his quest for the marvelous, whether visible or invisible.
From Ecuador, February
I have sinned, sinned in pleasure
Abnousse Shalmani
What could there be in common between Marie de Heredia, writer and great love of the sulphurous Pierre Louÿs in Belle Époque Paris, and the poet Forough Farrokhzad, who died tragically at the age of 32 after becoming the muse of Iranian literary circles? in Tehran of the 1950s? In I have sinned, sinned in pleasure, Abnousse Shalmanithe author of Khomeini, Sade and me (2014), born in 1977 in Tehran, will build a bridge between the East and the West by giving us in her own way the intersecting portrait of these two free women who both existed.
Grasset, March 6