Frank Wynne

"A funny, fast-paced, and poignant take on Franco-African history, as told through the eyes of three African security guards in Paris. All over the city, they are watching: Black men paid to stand guard, invisible among the wealthy flâneurs and yet the only ones who truly see. From Les Grands Moulins to a Sephora on the Champs-Élysées, Ferdinand, Ossiri, and Kassoum find their way as undocumented workers amidst political infighting and the ever-changing...

"In the soft morning light, a man, a woman, and a child drive beyond the borders of a sleepy French post-industrial town into the forested mountains beyond. After several years of absence, the man has reappeared in the life of his wife and their young son, intent on being a family again. He takes them to Les Roches, a dilapidated house in the mountains where he grew up with his own ruthless father. There, while the mother watches the passing days...

For Commandant Verhoeven life is beautiful: he's happily married, and expecting his first child with the lovely Irene. But his blissful existence is punctured by a murder so savage that even the most hardened officers on the force are shaken to the core. In the face of the seemingly motiveless horror, only Verhoeven makes the vital connection - the crime scene resembles one described in a James Ellroy novel too closely for there to be any coincidence....

"A gripping, multigenerational tale of a French Algerian woman, her family's past, and the legacies of colonialism"--

An elite prep school frozen in the snow. Three friends linked by a tragic secret. One girl taken by the night. The Côte d'Azur - 25 years ago: One freezing night, as her campus is paralyzed by a snowstorm, 19-year-old Vinca Rockwell, the most beautiful and glamorous girl in her prep school, runs away with her philosophy teacher, with whom she has been conducting a secret affair. For Vinca, "love is everything or nothing." She will never be seen again....

"The Pelletiers are a prominent French family living in 1948 Beirut. The patriarch, Louis, has built a successful business that he hopes to pass on to his eldest son. With no head for management, Jean nearly sinks the company, then marries a materialistic young woman who insists they emigrate to Paris and join high society. But there is another reason Jean must leave--he has committed a terrible crime. Youngest son Etienne is sent to make his fortune...

"The year is 1918, the war on the Western Front all but over. An ambitious officer, Lieutenant Henry D'Aulnay-Pradelle, sends two soldiers over the top and then surreptitiously shoots them in the back to incite his men to attack the German lines. When another of D'Aulnay-Pradelle's soldiers, Albert Maillard, reaches the bodies and discovers how they died, the lieutenant shoves him into a shell hole to silence him. Albert is rescued by fellow soldier,...

What does the man who has everything--fame, fortune, a new love, and a new baby--want for his fiftieth birthday? The answer is simple: eternal life. Determined to shake off the first intimations of his approaching demise, Frédéric tries every possible procedure to ward off death, examining both legal and illegal research into techniques that could lead to the imminent replacement of man with a post-human species. Accompanied by his ten-year-old...

"With humor, rage, and confessional detail, Virginie Despentes-in her own words "more King Kong than Kate Moss"-delivers a highly charged account of women's lives today. She explodes common attitudes about sex and gender and shows how modern beauty myths are ripe for rebelling against. Using her own experiences of rape, prostitution, and working in the porn industry as a jumping-off point, she creates a new space for all those who can't or won't obey...

A fairytale-like novel set during the height of World War II finds a childless, impoverished woodcutter's wife risking her safety to take in and protect a Jewish baby, a twin abandoned under desperate circumstances. World War II. In an enormous forest a woodcutter and his wife find it difficult to put food on the table. Yet every night, his wife prays for a child. A Jewish father rides on a train holding twin babies. His wife no longer has enough...