Released in early November in France, but just arrived here, The disunited kingdom14e english novel jonathan coe (Gallimard, in bookstores), promises to be a family fresco as vast as it is telescoped. The author of welcome to the club and of English will embraces 75 years of UK history in seven major moments. From the end of the war in May 1945 until the start of confinement, passing through the coronation of Elizabeth II and the funeral of Diana, Coe paints in this ambitious novel the portrait of an exemplary family and their small community of Bournville.
Sixteen years later The roadPulitzer for Fiction 2007 and Prix des libraires du Québec 2009, the American Cormac McCarthy, 90, will publish two novels in quick succession forming one and the same story. From the streets of New Orleans to the beaches of Ibiza, The passenger (L’Olivier, May) takes us on the trail of Bobby Western, a mathematician and physicist out of luck, haunted by the death of his sister Alicia, who mysteriously disappeared 10 years earlier. A dark and melancholic novel, but also a “parable about the uprooting of modern man”. Set 10 years before The passenger, Stella Maris (L’Olivier, June) is a kind of ante-episode which should lift the veil on the mysterious Alicia Western.
“Who on others slanders and lies / Does not know what hangs in the eye”. What do we know of the poet Marie de France, except that she was at the end of the twelfthe century the first French-speaking woman of letters? With Matrix (L’Olivier, March), the biographical novel that she devotes to him, Lauren Groff (the furies) intends to highlight a modern and rebellious woman. For the American, long before the word “feminism” appeared, Marie de France embodied “the absolute romantic heroine, the symbol of the struggles for emancipation”.
With The King and the Watchmaker (Métailié, April), Arnaldur Indriðasonthe king of Icelandic thrillers, takes up historical novels, imagining a meeting between the King of Denmark Christian VII, a friend of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, but considered mad, and the only watchmaker capable of repairing an astronomical clock designed during the Renaissance.
Olga Tokarczuk will explore the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and reality in Playing on drums and tambourines (Black on White, March), a collection of short stories originally published in 2001. Here, a writer surprises one morning, seated at his table, a double of himself who quietly corrects his latest manuscript. There, it’s a detective novel reader who finds a way to intervene in the plot of the bad thriller she started. The Nobel-winning Polish novelist explores a daily life “full of secret doors, crossed mirrors and other distortions of space and time”.
In Birds of passage (Actes Sud, in bookshops), the Spanish writer Fernando Aramburu takes a step aside after the success in 2018 of Fatherland, where he delved with force and skill into the intimate and political issues of the Basque nationalist question. This time, a Madrid philosophy professor records his thoughts every day for a year and without filter. A year at the end of which he intends to end his life… A big novel, happier than it seems.
The success of the unclassifiable Our part of the night (Prix des libraires du Québec 2022) has aroused interest in the work of Mariana Enriquez. First collection of short stories by the Argentinian author, The dangers of smoking in bed (Alto, April 25) will give us 12 stories that are said to “explore the most subterranean paths of sexuality, bigotry and obsessions”.
In 1986, having left Lebanon and the horrors of the civil war two years earlier, Muna Heddad moved to Montreal with her eight-year-old son, hoping to be able to teach French there. It will end up instead in a call center, offering dietetic meal boxes with some success. It will be about exile and resilience in Hotline (La Peuplade, February 14), the fourth novel by the English-Montreal writer Dmitri Nasrallahhimself born in Lebanon in 1977. A “tribute to the perseverance of migrant mothers”, says the publisher.
Following Nickel Boysfor which Colson Whitehead won its second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2020, Harlem Shuffle (Albin Michel, in bookstores) takes us into the world of an honest seller of furniture and household appliances who is drawn into crime by his cousin. A fresco of Harlem from the 1960s which promises to be the first part of a trilogy.
Finally, the spring of 2023 will also mark the return to the novel of Brett Easton Ellis13 years later Followingimperial(s). With Splinters (Robert Laffont, April), the author ofAmerican Psycho autofictionally recounts certain events that marked his small group of friends during their last year of high school in Los Angeles. On the menu, way less than zero : murder and music, Valium, sex, cocaine and nostalgia for the 1980s…