Dear all,

The new “Fiction France” is coming up for the Salon du livre. It will introduce you to twenty of the best reads from the January French rentrée littéraire. Here is a narrower selection to whet your appetite:

To begin with, two powerful novels dealing with History and the “flags of our fathers”: My Traitor, by Sorj Chalandon (Grasset) is based on his reports from Northern Ireland and inspired by his profound knowledge of the country and the exceptional relationship he had with the man who was, at one and the same time, his friend, a hero and a traitor. Le village de l’Allemand, by Boualem Sansal (Gallimard) is based on a true story and inspired by Primo Levi. The novel tackles profound and emotive issues. It makes a connection between three very different but interlinked chapters of history: the Holocaust, seen through the horrified eyes of a young Arab who discovers the truth about the mass extermination; Algeria’s dirty war of the 1990s, a theme in Sansal’s earlier works, and the situation in the French suburbs.

Fiction is nourished by everyday life : Yves Pagès takes facts and other real events from the early 1970s as the basis for a work of pure fiction : Le Soi-disant (Verticales). On 6 February 1973, a school in the Rue Édouard-Pailleron, Paris, burnt to the ground in just a quarter of an hour. By the next day there were over twenty dead. The author takes us back to the hallucinatory childhood world of Romain, absconding witness and unwilling accomplice to the fire. In the rhythms of children’s speech, images borrowed from cult films of the day and echoes of the spirit of protest Pagès finds a wealth of imagination and humour with which to elude the siren calls of the “so-called” reality principle. Les boxeurs finissent mal… en général ({Editions Héloïse d’Hormesson) by Lionel Froissart is a novel in the form of a twelve-round fight that revisits the meteoric trajectory of some of the greatest champions from the boxing world. A stunning work of fiction based on actual facts and featuring characters who appear under their real names.

Literature has never been “reassuring”. Mathieu Lindon with Mon coeur tout seul ne suffit pas (POL) frightens us with his hero who receives a strange letter, requiring him without delay to contact the daughter of one of his closest friends - who has just died. Yet he hasn´t the faintest memory of this friend… Lindon always manages subtly to slip in a seed of doubt, to show that nothing can be taken for granted and so to reach further, to exceed the everyday confines of fiction with complete originality. Quelques ombres (Le Dilettante) is a striking work by Pierre Charras. In eight short stories, the author stands out as a refiner of catastrophes and distiller of chaos, in slight and irremediable doses. Things are going smoothly, life is evolving limply, we’re swimming in calm waters, then suddenly along comes the splinter, or cramp. Or a gulch of sludge. Our world is rotten, and his pen seeks out such moments of rupture. L’hiver indien by Frédéric Roux (Grasset) is a crazy trip to Vancouver, in North-West America – the end of the end of the world. Forgotten by all, dispossessed from themselves, the Indian tribe of Makahs live a life of poverty and alcoholism, not so far removed from that of our modern, supposedly civilised, world. Until the day that six of them decide to go whale hunting again…

And to end up on a romantic tone, Serge Joncour wrote the beautiful and touching Combien de fois je t’aime (Flammarion) : eighteen stories of loving, eighteen ways to lose someone or find someone. Every facet of love today, its moments of magic and its timeless despair. Snapshots, poignant in their veracity and humanity.

We’ll be happy to discuss this selection and of course, all other French books of your interest.

All the best,